Suspected Nigerian Islamists opened fire and set off bombs at a market in the northeastern city of Maiduguri on Monday, killing at least 30 people, a medic and a witness said.

Gunmen believed to be members of the Islamist sect Boko Haram stormed the fish section of Baga market and sprayed stallholders and vendors with bullets, traders said, reporting that women and children were among the dead.

Rebels in Sudan's Darfur region said on Monday they had freed all 49 international peacekeepers captured one day earlier but that they continued to hold three Sudanese.

"We released the peacekeepers because our investigation confirmed that they came to our area without knowing it is under our control," Gibril Adam Bilal, spokesman for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), told Agence France Presse.

The Afghan government said Monday that police had rescued 41 children from becoming suicide bombers as they were about to be smuggled across the mountains into Pakistan.

Interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told a news conference that the children aged six to 11 had been released on February 15 from the clutches of four insurgents in eastern Kunar province.

Iran's military announced on Monday it has launched four days of maneuvers in the south of the country aimed at boosting anti-air defenses protecting nuclear sites.

"These exercises aim to reinforce the integrated abilities of the country's anti-air defenses," said a statement from the Katem-ol-Anbia military air base coordinating Iran's anti-air and ballistic missile systems.

Iran will cut oil exports to other EU countries if their "hostile actions" continue, the deputy oil minister who heads the state oil company said Monday, a day after Tehran halted sales to France and Britain.

Exports to Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Germany and the Netherlands would be stopped; Ahmed Qalebani was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency.

A court in Thailand has issued an arrest warrant for a fifth Iranian suspected of involvement in an alleged plot to kill Israeli diplomats in Bangkok, police said Monday.

The suspect, named as 57-year-old Norouzi Shaya Ali Akbar, faces charges of possessing and making explosives, said deputy national police chief Pansiri Prapawat.

Rabat has condemned an alleged plot to bomb the U.S. Capitol over which a Moroccan suspect was arrested, the official MAP agency reported Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday arrested Amine el-Khalifi, a 29-year-old immigrant from Morocco living illegally in the U.S. state of Virginia, in a sting operation.

Several thousand Pakistanis poured onto the streets of Islamabad Monday, chanting "death to America" and demanding holy war at a rally whipped up by right-wing, religious and banned organizations.

It was the latest show of support for Defense of Pakistan, a coalition of around 40 parties chaired by a cleric dubbed the father of the Taliban that include organizations blacklisted at home and abroad as terror groups.

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin vowed Monday that Russia would strengthen its military might and offer an "asymmetrical and effective" response to the deployment of a NATO missile shield.

"We must not tempt anyone with our weakness," Putin wrote in a fiercely worded article on national security in the state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, ahead of his bid for a third Kremlin term in March 4 presidential polls.

A suicide car bomber rammed the gate of a police station in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Monday, unleashing a powerful blast that killed at least one policeman, officials said.

General Abdul Raziq, the provincial police chief, said the attacker detonated a bomb-laden sedan at the gate of Kandahar city's fourth district police station, killing at least one officer.