NATO plans to end its seven-month air and sea mission in Libya on October 31, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Friday.

"Our operations are close to completion," Rasmussen said after lengthy talks with ambassadors from the 28-member alliance. There is "a preliminary agreement on the 31st of October."

The U.N. Security Council on Friday passed a resolution calling on Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh to immediately sign a deal under which he would quit.

The resolution, unanimously agreed by the 15 members, "strongly condemns" deadly government attacks on demonstrators and backs a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) peace plan under which Saleh would end his 33 years in power.

The United States on Friday urged Libyan's interim leaders to provide "a transparent account" of the death of strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

The National Transitional Council "has already been working to determine the precise cause and circumstances of Gadhafi’s death and we obviously urge them to do so in an open and transparent manner as we move forward," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Amnesty International on Friday urged the new Libyan authorities to carry out a "full, independent and impartial investigation" into how Moammar Gadhafi died.

The group said that if he was deliberately killed in captivity it would constitute a war crime.

Russia on Friday said a convoy carrying Moammar Gadhafi posed no danger to civilians when attacked by NATO jets and questioned other circumstances of the Libyan strongman's violent death.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added sternly that Western leaders were premature in celebrating the veteran dictator's death because its circumstances breached basic international law.

Thousands of Jordanian demonstrators on Friday urged prime minister-designate Awn Khasawneh to implement political change as the international judge prepares to announce his reform-mandated government.

"We are demonstrating today to emphasize public demands for reform and demand the new government introduce genuine reforms," Zaki Bani Rsheid, head of the opposition Islamic Action Front (IAF), told Agence France Presse.

Jordan's opposition Islamists urged Arab rulers to draw lessons from the death of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, saying his demise heralded a new era in the region.

"The death of Gadhafi was the logical end of any tyrant," Zaki Bani Rsheid, head of the Islamic Action Front (IAF) political bureau, told Agence France Presse.

A video that went viral on Friday on social networking websites showed a bloodied Moammar Gadhafi begging the new regime fighters for mercy after his capture.

Gadhafi was later declared dead by the National Transitional Council, Libya’s new rulers.

Syrian security forces killed 18 civilians on Friday, 15 of them in the flashpoint central city of Homs, where the death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi galvanized mass protests, rights activists said.

"Fifteen people were killed in Homs," which has been at the heart of military operations this week, Rami Abdul Rahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Agence France Presse.

Iran's intelligence minister on Friday dismissed as "stupid" a U.S. charge that Tehran planned to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

Minister Heydar Moslehi, quoted by the state television website, pointed to the reasons he termed the alleged plot as "too mediocre to be believed."