Nineteen detainees, including two men sentenced to death and several alleged al-Qaida leaders, escaped from a prison in northern Iraq on Friday, in what one politician said was an inside job.

"Nineteen people, including members of al-Qaida and Ansar al-Sunna, fled from prison in Kirkuk at around 3:30 am (0030 GMT)," a security official said.

A U.N. Security Council peace call for Syria has "merit" but "does not respond to the real needs of the Syrian people", the head of main opposition group the Syrian National Council said Thursday.

"The Syrian National Council supports any measure intended to stop the daily slaughter that the Syrian people have lived with for months," SNC president Burhan Ghalioun told Agence France Presse in Paris.

Fierce clashes erupted in Syria on Thursday, with a busload of fleeing civilians among 110 killed, as President Bashar al-Assad's foes described a U.N. Security Council peace call as toothless.

The army attacked a string of towns, while rebel fighters struck military posts in several provinces and announced a command structure to coordinate hit-and-run strikes in and around Damascus.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend the next "Friends of Syria" talks in Turkey, an official said Thursday, amid efforts to end the Syrian regime's bloody year-old crackdown.

Clinton will join the April 1 talks in Istanbul after she took part in the first such meeting in Tunis last month that drew 60 countries, including Turkey, Arab states and western powers, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday slammed as "hypocritical" a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution, which ordered a first probe into Israeli settlements.

"This council has an automatic majority hostile to Israel and is hypocritical," Netanyahu was quoted as saying in a statement released by his office.

Claims by Iraq's fugitive Sunni vice president that his bodyguard was tortured while in custody were denied on Thursday by authorities, who insisted he died of kidney failure.

Amir Sarbut Zaidan al-Batawi died earlier this month and his body was handed over to his family, with Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, wanted by Baghdad on terror charges, releasing photographs he said showed the 33-year-old married father-of-three was tortured.

Thirty-seven people, most of them suspected al-Qaida fighters, were killed over the past 48 hours in violence across Yemen's restive south, local and military officials said Thursday.

"The bodies of 29 al-Qaida militants were killed in (army) shelling" on their hideouts north and northeast of the southern city of Zinjibar, and buried in the nearby town of Jaar, a local official said.

An international action plan is needed to stop the "human tragedy" in Syria, Turkey's foreign minister said Thursday after a U.N. Security Council statement calling for all sides to end violence.

"In addition to a common message we also have to develop a joint plan of action," Ahmet Davutoglu said after talks in Vienna with his Austrian counterpart ahead of an EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels that he will attend.

Libya's new rulers, under pressure from human rights groups, have vowed to put on trial Moammar Gadhafi's former spy chief before June elections if Mauritania extradites him as expected.

Fathi Baaja of the National Transitional Council said that trials of Gadhafi loyalists have so far lagged in Libya due to inadequate prison infrastructure and a paralyzed judiciary.

Syria's main opposition group on Thursday said a U.N. statement calling for all parties to end violence in Syria will simply give the regime more time to continue killing its own people.

"Such statements, issued amid continued killings, offer the regime the opportunity to push ahead with its repression in order to crush the revolt by the Syrian people," said Samir Nashar, member of the executive committee of the Syrian National Council.