The United States is sending Iraq dozens of missiles and surveillance drones to help combat a recent surge there in al-Qaida-backed violence, a State Department official said Thursday.

The official confirmed a New York Times report about the weapons shipment. The daily said 75 Hellfire missiles were purchased by Iraq and delivered by Washington last week.

The military-installed government's listing of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group signals determination to uproot its vast grass-roots network, possibly radicalizing the Islamists as they go underground, analysts said.

Security forces had already decimated the group following Islamist president Mohammed Morsi's overthrow in July, with more than 1,000 people killed and thousands more imprisoned, including the Brotherhood's top leadership.

The Swiss expert who examined samples of Yasser Arafat's remains dismissed as a "political declaration" a statement Thursday by Russian researchers excluding radiation poisoning as the cause for the Palestinian leader's death.

"The Russians, they make claims without providing any data, without providing any scientific arguments, for me that is empty, a political declaration," said Francois Bochud, director of the Lausanne Radiophysics Institute.

Egyptian prosecutors ordered at least 18 Muslim Brotherhood members, including an ex-lawmaker, held on accusations of belonging to a terrorist group, a day after the government blacklisted the movement, state media reported.

They include the son of a deputy leader of deposed president Mohammed Morsi's movement, which the government declared yesterday a terrorist organisation, the official MENA news agency said.

Egypt's army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, vowed Thursday to fight terrorism and stabilize the deeply polarized country.

"Do not worry or fear, the army will sacrifice for Egypt. We will eliminate" terrorism, Sisi said at a military ceremony, in his first comments after Egypt was rocked by two bomb attacks this week.

Moroccan authorities said Thursday they had dismantled a "terrorist cell" operating in several cities that included people trained in the use of firearms and explosives.

North Africa has been on heightened alert in recent years as regional jihadist groups have grown more powerful and as the turmoil in Libya following Moammarr Gadhafi's 2011 overthrow has left the vast and mostly desert region awash with weapons.

A Saudi judge has recommended that a liberal activist be tried in a higher court for apostasy, a charge that could carry the death penalty, rights campaigners said Thursday.

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom sentenced Raef Badawi in July to seven years in jail and 600 lashes for setting up a "liberal" network and for allegedly insulting Islam.

Russian forensic experts studying the remains of Yasser Arafat on Thursday said the Palestinian leader died a natural death, ruling out radiation poisoning.

"We have completed all the studies," Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia's Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA), told a news conference.

A Kuwaiti court has rejected a petition by a former al-Qaia spokesman to reclaim his Kuwaiti citizenship revoked by the oil-rich Gulf state over his militant activities, a newspaper reported Thursday.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, the administrative court based its rejection on the grounds that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the son-in-law of slain al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, was a member of a group that carried out terrorist attacks killing innocent people, Al-Qabas daily reported.

A bomb exploded near a bus in Cairo Thursday injuring five people, a day after the government widened a crackdown on Islamists by declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group.

The windows of the red and black public transport bus were shattered in the explosion at a busy intersection in the north Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City.