Bahrain's interior ministry said Sunday a blast occurred inside a minibus parked near the British Embassy, but there were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries.

A brief statement posted by the ministry said the explosion occurred in a public parking area near the British diplomatic compound in the capital Manama. Investigators sealed off the area.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak expressed deep concern on Saturday after early results in Egypt's post-revolution election showed Islamists sweeping to victory.

"The process of Islamization in Arab countries is very worrying," Barak told Israel's private Channel Two television.

Gun and bomb attacks in Iraq killed five people, including an army brigadier general, and wounded three others on Saturday, security officials said.

Unknown gunmen shot dead army Brigadier General Fadhel al-Azul and his wife in the Urr neighborhood in northern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

The Muslim Brotherhood, expected to win 40 percent of votes in the first phase of Egypt's post-revolution election, stressed Saturday it was a moderate force, not to be confused with hardliners.

The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party is set to emerge as the dominant force in the country's lower house of parliament for which voting began in a third of Egypt's districts on Monday and Tuesday.

Syria on Saturday condemned a U.N. vote on rights violations by the country's security forces as "unjust," and said it was based on false information from the regime's foes.

The U.N. Human Rights Council resolution passed in a vote on Friday was "unjust and "prepared in advance by parties hostile to Syria," the foreign ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SANA.

The leader of the main opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) appealed Saturday for a U.N. Security Council resolution to end the regime's deadly crackdown on civilians, while ruling out military intervention.

"What we will seek from the Security Council, above all, are mechanisms for the protection of the innocent civilians," Burhan Ghaliun told journalists on the sidelines of a transitional democracy forum in Sofia.

A French minister said there was no such thing as moderate Islam, calling recent election successes by Islamic parties in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia "worrying" in an interview published Saturday.

Jeannette Bougrab, a junior minister with responsibility for youth, told Le Parisien newspaper that legislation based on Islamic sharia law "inevitably" imposed restrictions on rights and freedoms.

Eleven civilians were among 23 people killed in Syria on Saturday, a day after the U.N. Human Rights Council urged tougher action against Damascus and condemned its "gross violations" of human rights.

The fresh bloodletting came despite the U.N. resolution which the Syrian foreign ministry dismissed as "unjust" and "politically motivated" by enemies of the embattled regime of President Bashar Assad.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad threatens to "fan the flames" of sectarian conflict not only in Syria but in the wider region, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said in talks with the Turkish president, a U.S. official said Saturday.

"Assad and his regime are the source of instability in Syria now and pose the greatest danger to fanning flames of sectarian conflict not only in Syria but beyond," Biden told Abdullah Gul when they met Friday, the senior official told reporters.

Turkish troops killed three Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey overnight, local security sources said on Saturday.

The army launched an operation against militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in a rural area near Lice on Friday night, they said.