Saudi Arabia's consultative Shoura council has recommended allowing women to vote in the next local polls, in at least four years, without being permitted to run for office, a member said Tuesday.

Saudi men in the ultra-conservative kingdom will vote in September to elect half the members of municipal councils across the country, but Saudi women who are deprived of many basic rights, remain banned from voting.

Two Saudi border guards were shot dead by a man who attempted to cross the frontier into Yemen before he was killed by Saudi forces, the interior ministry spokesman said Tuesday.

General Mansour al-Turki said a colonel and a sergeant were shot dead, while another sergeant was wounded by a Saudi national whom they tried to stop from crossing into Yemen in a 4x4 vehicle early Tuesday.

Armed dissidents have seized control of most of Yemen's second largest city Taez, following clashes with troops loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a top tribal chief said Tuesday.

"I consider Taez to have fallen under the control" of the dissidents, Sheikh Hammoud Saeed al-Mikhlafi, the head of the tribal council in Taez told Agence France Presse by telephone.

One person died from gunshot wounds as 41 refugees fleeing unrest in Syria crossed the border into Turkey over the weekend, a Turkish diplomat told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

"A man with gunshot wounds died in an ambulance heading to a hospital in Turkey, after he crossed the border in a serious condition," the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Four explosions shook the center of the Libyan capital Tuesday, sending plumes of smoke billowing across an area in which strongman Moammar Gadhafi has his residence, an Agence France Presse correspondent witnessed.

The first blast rocked Tripoli at 10:45 am (0845 GMT) and was followed by three others.

Vandals tried to set fire to a mosque in the northern West Bank, causing damage to the inside, Palestinian security sources said on Tuesday, blaming Jewish settlers.

The attackers set fire to a number of tires inside the mosque in al-Mughayyir village, some 20 kilometers northeast of Ramallah, which damaged prayer mats inside the building.

Heavy clashes between troops and suspected al-Qaida gunmen at the gates of the southern Yemen city of Zinjibar left 15 people dead, nine of them soldiers, the military and medics said Tuesday.

The fighting erupted overnight when troops advanced on Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province, as they prepared to wrest it back from the control of suspected al-Qaida militants, who overran most of it on May 29.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a cool welcome Monday to a French plan to host a Middle East peace conference, saying it must be linked to a willingness to resume talks.

"The idea of any gathering, conference or meeting has to be linked to willingness by the parties to resume negotiating," the chief U.S. diplomat said during a press conference with her French counterpart Alain Juppe.

The White House called Monday for an "immediate transition" of power in Yemen, where the United States fears al-Qaida could exploit political turmoil and strengthen its presence.

After four months of deadly unrest, Ali Abdullah Saleh's 33-year-old regime was teetering even before the president was wounded in an attack on his palace and flown late Saturday to neighboring Saudi Arabia for treatment.

Some 120 Syrian police officers taking part in security operations alongside the army in the northwest were killed by "armed gangs" in the town of Jisr Shugour on Monday, state-run news agency SANA quoted a Syrian official as saying.

"The armed groups are committing a veritable massacre. They have mutilated bodies and thrown others into the Assi river," state television reported earlier. "They have burned government buildings."