Hungarian authorities on Wednesday said they had accepted an Austrian request to take over a probe into the deaths of 71 migrants found in a truck on an Austrian motorway in August.

Vienna asked Budapest last month to handle the case, because the 59 men, eight women and four children were thought to have suffocated while the lorry was still in Hungary.

Maldives President Abdulla Yameen declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, giving security forces sweeping powers to arrest suspects ahead of a major anti-government protest rally.

The move, announced on Twitter, follows an alleged attempt to assassinate Yameen and the discovery of a bomb near his official residence.

Turkey has arrested nine suspected members of the Islamic State group for allegedly plotting suicide attacks on a political party and an opposition newspaper, media reports said Wednesday.

Police detained two suspects after a car chase on Friday in the southeastern province of Gaziantep near the Syrian border and another seven accomplices were detained in later police raids, the Dogan news agency reported.

A young French fisherman accused of helping migrants cross the Channel to Britain was arrested with five others near the port town of Dunkirk, a judicial source said Wednesday.

The man, who is thought to be around 20, was detained on Monday along with two Vietnamese citizens and three Albanians, a judicial source in the northern city of Lille said.

Turkey will make a leap forward if it adopts a system strengthening the powers of strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after his ruling party's election win, his spokesman said on Wednesday.

"We have a clear opinion that the presidential system will help Turkey jump to another league," Ibrahim Kalin told reporters in Ankara, signaling that the issue could be put to the Turkish people in a referendum.

At least 27 people were killed Wednesday when a plane crashed shortly after taking off from South Sudan's capital Juba, an AFP reporter said.

Police were pulling the bodies of men, women and children out of the wreckage of the Russian-built Antonov An-12 cargo plane, which smashed into a farming community on an island on the White Nile river, according to the reporter, who counted at least 27 dead.

Migrants have made some 800,000 "illegal entries" to the European Union so far this year, the head of the bloc's border agency Frontex said in an interview with German newspaper Bild published Wednesday.

Warning that the influx of migrants has probably not yet "reached its peak", Fabrice Leggeri called for European states to detain unsuccessful asylum seekers so they can be "rapidly" sent back to their countries of origin.

French anti-tank missiles, Swedish jets and American assault rifles -- Western governments have criticized Thailand's junta for toppling democracy but at a Bangkok arms fair it was business as usual.

The kingdom's well-oiled military has been handsomely rewarded in the last decade during which it has twice seized power, ousting elected governments in 2006 and 2014 coups.

South Sudan's army and rebel forces have agreed to deploy joint military units in the capital, a key stage of a peace deal aimed to end nearly two years of war.

Both sides have repeatedly traded blame for breaking an August 26 peace deal, the eighth such agreement.

A powerful 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Indonesia on Wednesday, U.S. seismologists said, with some reports of minor property damage but no casualties recorded so far.

The quake struck at a depth of 14km kilometers (8.5 miles) under the Alor Sea at about 10:44 (0345 GMT), roughly 77km from the East Timorese capital of Dili, the US Geological Survey said.