A candidate in the upcoming poll for a constituent assembly was murdered in Libya's southern desert on Sunday shortly after submitting his registration, a security official said.

"Khaled Abu Saleh was murdered 30 kilometers from Ubari," in the south of Libya, Mohammed Saleh, deputy chairman of the High Security Commission, told Agence France Presse.

Egyptian presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq's campaign boasted on Saturday that the former air force chief had shot down two Israeli planes during war, as it dismissed accusations of corruption.

Shafiq, former president Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister before an uprising toppled the dictator last year, claimed to have downed the planes during the War of Attrition which Egypt declared between 1969 and 1970.

Syrian opposition leader Burhan Ghalioun on Sunday said he stood ready to hand over the chairmanship of the Syrian National Council (SNC) to others to broaden its appeal.

The SNC is supposed to appoint a new chairman every three months, but Ghalioun has remained leader since the council was set up in October 2011 because of lack of agreement over a successor.

A leading Islamist candidate in Egypt's presidential election has branded Israel a "racist state" and said a shared 1979 peace treaty was "a national security threat" that should be revised.

Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh also denounced al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden's assassination by U.S. special forces as an act of "state terrorism," in a late Saturday Egyptian television interview.

Israel should consider cutting its supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip this summer if it experiences power shortages, Israeli Environment Minister Gilad Erdan said on Sunday.

Erdan, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, outlined the proposal in a letter to ministers, who were scheduled to discuss the issue in their Sunday cabinet meeting.

A letter from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the stalled peace process doesn't address key issues hindering talks, the Palestine Liberation Organization said on Sunday.

Speaking after a meeting of the PLO's executive committee, secretary general Yasser Abed Rabbo said the Israeli premier's message contained no answers to the questions posed in a letter by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas last month.

An Algerian Islamist leader said Sunday that a Tunisian-style revolt was the only option after polls he charged were fraudulent and threatened a mass pullout of smaller parties from parliament.

"These results closed the door on change by the ballot box, and the Tunisian option is all that's left for those who believe in change," Abdallah Djaballah, who heads the Front for Justice and Development, told Agence France Presse.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas warned on Sunday of a "national disaster" if any of the 1,550 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails were to die.

Abbas spoke as two of the hunger strikers, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla, entered their 75th day without eating, and after international rights groups and governments said they were concerned that prisoners could die if they continued to refuse food.

Bulgaria's ambassador to Yemen has escaped a kidnap attempt while he was driving through Sanaa, where Oman has closed its embassy and withdrawn its staff over "terrorist threats," diplomats and security officials said.

In Sofia, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov confirmed the aborted abduction of ambassador Boris Borisov and said the diplomat was injured.

The head of the dissident Free Syrian Army charged in remarks published Sunday that al-Qaida has links with the powerful airforce intelligence of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"If al-Qaida militants have indeed entered the country, it happened with the cooperation of that agency," FSA chief, Colonel Riyadh al-Asaad, told Kuwait's Al-Rai newspaper.