Bloody clashes erupted between police and pro-independence protesters in Western Sahara, a human rights group said Monday, as the U.N. envoy wrapped up his latest visit to the disputed territory.

Dozens of civilians required hospital treatment, including women and children, after police moved to break up a "peaceful protest" in the territory's main city Laayoune on Saturday, the Moroccan Human Rights Association (AMDH) said.

Algeria said Monday it supports "intensified efforts" by the U.N. envoy to Western Sahara, as he began a new tour of the region, while underlining the Sahrawi people's right to self-determination.

Christopher Ross flew to Rabat at the weekend on the first leg of his latest mission to break the deadlock over the disputed territory.

A U.N. envoy on the Western Sahara conflict is on a new mission to break the deadlock over the territory and is to have talks with Moroccan leaders, the U.N. said Thursday.

The envoy, Christopher Ross, is also to return to Western Sahara which Morocco took over in 1975 following a Spanish withdrawal, a U.N. spokeswoman said.

Families separated for almost four decades by the conflict in Western Sahara will be reunited, often for the first time, by the expansion of a U.N. program for refugees living in camps near Tindouf, Algeria.

An agreement reached in Geneva between Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and Western Sahara guerilla group the Polisario Front will initiate a new flight schedule to ferry refugees to their families and vice versa for 2014.

Morocco denied on Saturday accusations by Amnesty International that security forces tortured six men who were arrested after a demonstration calling for the independence of Western Sahara.

The Sahrawis were arrested on May 9 in connection with a protest that took place five days earlier in Laayoune, the main city in disputed Western Sahara, which turned violent.

Six Sahrawi activists arrested this month after pro-independence protests in Western Sahara said they were tortured by Moroccan police and made to sign confessions, Amnesty International charged on Thursday.

"According to the information received by Amnesty International, all six men told the investigative judge that they had been tortured and otherwise ill-treated and that their 'confessions' were extracted under torture in police custody," the rights group said.

Polisario Front chief Mohamed Abdelaziz has warned that his movement could take up arms to seek independence from Morocco if the U.N. fails to resolve the Western Sahara conflict, Algeria's APS news agency reported Saturday.

"We have believed in the United Nations, but if it fails to organize a referendum on self-determination in Western Sahara to allow the Sahrawi people to recover independence, then we will take up arms to liberate our territory," APS quoted Abdelaziz as saying.

Polisario Front leader Mohamed Abdelaziz said on Friday Morocco's "policy of fear and terror" in the Western Sahara had failed and that victory was in sight.

Abdelaziz, the self-styled Sahrawi president, was speaking on the 40th anniversary of the rebel group's formation.

Hundreds of pro-independence Sahrawi activists marched in Laayoune at the weekend, the Western Sahara's largest city, in the biggest protest in several decades, Moroccan press reported Monday.

Some 500 people marched peacefully late on Saturday afternoon, but violence broke out in the evening after the protest, wounding 21 policemen, according to several papers.

At least 40 people including eight policemen were injured when a pro-independence demonstration on the disputed Western Sahara turned violent, police and Amnesty International said on Saturday.

Around 100 people took part in Friday's protest, according to an Agence France Presse correspondent in the Western Sahara city of Laayoune a day after a U.N. Security Council resolution renewed the mandate of the Western Sahara peacekeeping force known as MINURSO.