Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is unlikely to seek reelection at the next elections in 2013 and has named a possible successor as incumbent Justice Minister Angelo Alfano.

During a private dinner on Tuesday evening with foreign journalists, Berlusconi, 74, told reporters off the record that he would not be standing as a candidate in the next elections -- news that was then leaked by the press.

U.S. drones on Wednesday resumed missile attacks in Pakistan for the first time in a month, killing six fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network on the Afghan border, officials said.

Unmanned aircraft fired four missiles into a vehicle travelling through the South Waziristan district, targeting a common root for Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants who infiltrate Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

A suicide attack ripped through a gathering of tribal elders in eastern Afghanistan's Kunar province on Wednesday, killing 10 people, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.

"A suicide attacker targeted a gathering of tribal elders in the Asmar district of Kunar today," Bashary told Agence France Presse. "Ten people have been martyred and seven others have been injured."

Belarus has arrested two suspects over the attack on the Minsk metro that killed 12, including a man suspected of planting the bomb at the station, deputy prosecutor general Andrei Shved said Wednesday.

"The first investigative actions are being carried out on these two people with lawyers. The first confessions have been obtained," he said, quoted by the Interfax-Zapad news agency.

The thunder of heavy weapons rocked Abidjan once more Tuesday as President Alassane Ouattara struggled to take control of Ivory Coast's commercial capital after capturing his rival Laurent Gbagbo who was placed under house arrest.

U.S. President Barack Obama telephoned Ouattara to congratulate him on taking power and called for justice for the victims of the bloody political crisis.

Al-Qaida's leader in Istanbul was among a group of around 40 people detained by police Tuesday in a series of raids targeting Islamists in Turkey's largest city, media reports said.

The security forces made the arrests in raids on some 50 locations in Istanbul, the NTV news channel said, adding that the suspects included the leader of al-Qaida in the city, although he was not named.

Japan raised the severity level of the crisis at its crippled nuclear plant Tuesday to rank it on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, citing cumulative radiation leaks that have contaminated the air, tap water, vegetables and seawater.

Japanese nuclear regulators said the rating was being raised from 5 to 7 — the highest level on an international scale overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency — after new assessments of radiation leaks from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant since it was disabled by the March 11 tsunami.

The death toll rose to 12 Tuesday after a blast described as an act of terror tore through a metro station in the Belarus capital near President Alexander Lukashenko's headquarters.

"As of 2:30 local time (23:30 GMT), the number of dead reached 12 people, six of whom have been identified," the country's KGB security service said in a statement, cited by the Interfax news agency.

A blast on Monday tore through a packed metro station near Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko's headquarters, killing eleven commuters and wounding nearly 100 in a suspected act of terror.

The explosion left clouds of suffocating smoke inside the capital Minsk's busiest metro station, whose exits lead to both the strongman president's main office and his residence as well as the country's powerful Security Council.

Ivory Coast leader Alassane Ouattara's forces, backed by French and U.N. troops, captured his besieged rival Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan on Monday at the climax of a deadly months-long crisis.

Gbagbo, who has held power since 2000 and stubbornly refused to admit defeat in November's presidential election, was detained and taken to his rival's temporary headquarters, with his wife Simone and son Michel.