A bomb attack Monday in central Baghdad on a government convoy killed a provincial councilor and wounded eight other people, including three bodyguards, an interior ministry official said.

"Jassem Ali Mahmud was killed and three of his bodyguards and five passersby were wounded when a bomb exploded as their convoy passed through Khulani neighborhood," the official said.

A Frenchman murdered by a security guard in Yemen at the Austrian company where they worked was killed in a terrorist crime rather than for personal reasons as first claimed, the interior minister said on Saturday.

"The investigation has revealed that this was a terrorist crime, whose perpetrator had contacts with elements of Al-Qaida," official media quoted Motahar Rashad al-Masri as saying without elaborating.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is fighting to keep his job after an inconclusive March 7 general election, is to visit neighboring Iran soon, a close aide said on Saturday.

"The prime minister will visit Iran soon but I cannot confirm when," the official from Maliki's office told AFP.

Australia has lifted its travel warning for Yemen to its highest possible level, saying there was a "very high threat of terrorist attack" in the Arabian peninsula's poorest nation.

The updated travel advisory released late Friday comes just days after United States President Barack Obama warned that Al-Qaida was pursuing a "murderous agenda" in the increasingly violent state.

A former Guantanamo detainee who rejoined Al-Qaida in Yemen after graduating from Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation programme has turned himself in to Saudi authorities, the government said on Friday.

Jaber Jabran al-Faifi, about 35, contacted the Saudi government in recent weeks saying he wanted to return home and a handover was arranged through Yemen's government, interior ministry spokesman General Mansour al-Turki said.

An Iranian official said Tehran has exported its petrochemicals to Egypt, a country with which it has still not restored diplomatic ties broken more than 30 years ago.

"The first shipment of 25,000 tons of petrochemicals was sent to Egypt," Iran's Mehr news agency quoted Reza Hamzelou, director of Petrochemicals Commercial Co, which sells petrochemicals at home and abroad, as saying.

Eighteen people were killed in a fire at an ammunitions store in a Revolutionary Guards base in Iran, the Fars news agency quoted a commander of the elite force as saying Wednesday in the latest toll.

"In yesterday's explosion at one of the Guards' bases in Lorestan (in western Iran), 18 people were killed and 14 wounded," commander Yadollah Bouali said.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is to visit Syria on Wednesday for talks with President Bashar al-Assad after a year-long spat between the neighbors sparked by massive bombings in Baghdad.

"Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is to start on Wednesday, tomorrow, a visit to Syria, our brother country, where he will meet his Excellency, President Bashar al-Assad, and Prime Minister Mohammed Naji Otri," it said.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the option of the UN Security Council creating a Palestinian state cannot be ruled out, in an interview published Sunday.

Kouchner told the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam that France preferred a two-state solution to be negotiated with Israel, but said appealing to the Security Council to resolve the conflict remained a possibility.

Around 300 Israeli Druze are for the first time to be allowed into Syria for a religious visit after they were given permission by the interior ministry, the head of Israel's Druze community said on Thursday.

The visit will see a large group of Druze religious leaders travelling to Syria for a week-long visit during which they will tour pilgrimage sites and visit relatives there.