Interior Minister Fawzi Abdelali resigned on Sunday after coming under fire for the performance of security forces during a surge of violence that has rocked Libya, an official from his office told Agence France Presse.

"He submitted his resignation to protest against congressmen criticizing the government and to defend the revolutionaries," the official said, referring to former rebels who now form part of Libya's security services.

A veteran Japanese war reporter killed while covering the anti-regime movement in Syria suffered nine bullet wounds with the fatal injury sustained in the neck, police said Sunday after an autopsy.

Mika Yamamoto is believed to have come under fire on Monday from pro-government troops in Aleppo, Syria's second city, which has borne the brunt of fighting in the country over the past month.

Saudi authorities announced on Sunday they had foiled a "terror" plot by elements suspected of links to al-Qaida, mostly Yemenis, and busted two extremist cells in Riyadh and Jeddah.

The interior ministry said in a statement the suspects were "in contact with the deviant organization abroad," a term usually used to refer to the al-Qaida jihadist network.

A series of attacks in and around Baghdad and in north Iraq on Sunday killed 10 people, including three soldiers and two policemen, security and medical officials said.

The gun and bomb attacks took to 256 the number of people killed nationwide so far this month, according to an Agence France Presse tally, already equal to the comparable figure from July.

Syria's regime will only look at negotiating with the opposition after "purging" rebels from the country, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said on Sunday, according to talks with a visiting Iranian official reported by Iran's IRNA news agency.

"The plan for negotiations between the Syrian government and opposition will begin after purging Syria of armed groups," Muallem was quoted as saying after meeting the chairman of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, Aladin Borujerdi, in Damascus.

Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa made his first public appearance in over a month on Sunday, following rumors that he had tried to defect and was under house arrest.

Sharaa, who met the head of the Iranian parliament's foreign policy committee, Aladin Borujerdi, was last seen in public at a state funeral for top security officials who were killed in a Damascus bomb blast on July 18.

Yemeni security forces arrested two suspected al-Qaida members in Aden on Sunday, eight days after a deadly attack on the intelligence services in the southern port city, a security official said.

The two suspected militants were "hiding in a house near the intelligence headquarters" where 19 soldiers were killed in the August 18 rocket attack and suicide bombing which authorities blamed on al-Qaida.

An Egyptian man was reported to be in stable condition after he set fire to himself on Saturday outside the presidential palace in Cairo to protest against losing his job, police officials said.

The employee at a state-owned electricity company had won a court ruling to get back his job, but the company ignored the verdict. He doused himself in petrol and set himself alight as a last resort, the officials said.

Three rockets fired from Gaza hit southern Israel on Sunday, damaging two factories in the border town of Sderot but without causing any casualties, the Israeli army said.

"Two rockets hit two factories in the industrial zone in Sderot, while a third exploded in a nearby field," a spokeswoman said, referring to a town of 24,000 people which lies less than a kilometre (half a mile) from the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of bodies have been found in a town outside Damascus after a ferocious five-day assault by the Syrian army, a watchdog said on Sunday, as activists accused government forces of a "massacre".

At least 320 people have been killed during the offensive by government troops in Daraya, a satellite town of some 200,000 people to the southwest of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.