A UAE court jailed 10 pirates for life on Tuesday after they were convicted of hijacking a ship east of Oman in the Arabian Sea last year, state news agency WAM reported.

The life sentence, which equates to 25 years, will be followed by deportation, WAM said.

A Cairo court on Tuesday sentenced five policemen to 10 years in jail in absentia for the killing of protesters during the uprising which ousted president Hosni Mubarak, judicial sources told Agence France Presse.

Judge Mohammed Faheem, who issued the ruling, also handed out one-year suspended sentences to two other policemen.

Israel is "highly skeptical" about a deal between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran aimed at trying to solve the dispute over its nuclear drive, a senior official said on Tuesday.

"We are highly skeptical about this apparent agreement between the IAEA and Iran," he told Agence France Presse, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The World Food Program on Tuesday started distributing food to 12,500 Syrians in Jordan, where tens of thousands of refugees have fled from President Bashar Assad's forces.

"The food packages, including rice, sugar, vegetable oil and lentil, are being distributed with the help of Jordan Red Crescent," the U.N. agency said in a statement carried by state-run Petra news agency.

The Kuwaiti cabinet walked out of a parliamentary session Tuesday over a plan by opposition MPs to quiz the finance minister on alleged financial and administrative irregularities.

The move came as the opposition-dominated parliament was about to vote on a proposal to merge two grillings, a step strongly rejected by the government on legal basis.

Iran has recalled its ambassador to Azerbaijan for consultations, the Iranian embassy in Baku said on Tuesday, amid a growing row between the two neighbors.

"Ambassador Mohammad Bagher Bahrami left for Tehran on May 21 in connection with the insulting of religious saints in Azerbaijan. He was recalled for consultations," charge d'affaires Ahmed Nemati said in a statement.

Bombings in the center of the ethnically-mixed city of Baquba, north of Baghdad, killed six people including four children on Tuesday, an army officer and a doctor said.

The attacks struck the homes of a Sunni anti-Qaida militiaman and a formerly internally-displaced Shiite family, both of which are in a neighborhood that was an insurgent stronghold during the worst of Iraq's sectarian bloodshed.

Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja described his imprisonment as a "crime" on Tuesday as he attended his trial for the first time since launching a hunger strike in February, arriving in a wheelchair.

"The continuation of my arrest is a crime," Khawaja, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, told the appeals court. "Stop this sham trial."

A dust storm shut Iraq's airport on Tuesday, an Iraqi Airways official said, a day ahead of key talks between world powers and Iran on the Islamic republic's controversial nuclear program.

"There are no take-offs or landings ... because of bad weather," the official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

A bomb rocked the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboon during the night killing five people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday.

The Britain-based group gave no further information on the deadly explosion but said powerful blasts were also heard overnight in several regions across the country, including central Hama and the coastal cities of Banias and Latakia.