Two detainees were sent home to Algeria from the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay Thursday, over the prisoners' protests that they feared persecution there.

A Pentagon statement said Djamel Saiid Ali Ameziane and Bensayah Belkecem were transferred from the "war on terror" prison after a review "which examined a number of factors, including security issues."

Two Algerian detainees at Guantanamo Bay are fighting efforts by U.S. President Barack Obama's administration to transfer them to their homeland, fearing abuse, a lawyer said Friday.

Attorney Robert Kirsch said he had pressed the Pentagon and State Department, along with the Algerian Embassy in Washington, to avoid the men's "imminent" repatriation set to take place as early as this weekend.

Three Algerians accused of abducting and killing a young man one year ago in the Kabylie region have been handed the death penalty, Algerian media reported on Tuesday.

A fourth defendant, accused of demanding a ransom with threats, was jailed for three years and fined, the national APS news agency reported.

Algeria's 76-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was on Saturday designated his party's candidate in the 2014 presidential election, despite having been largely unseen for months because of health woes.

Bouteflika, in power since 1999, returned home in July after nearly three months in France recovering from a mini-stroke, and presided over a cabinet meeting on September 29 for the first time this year.

The Lebanese army detained on Saturday nine gunmen in the northern Bekaa after infiltrating Lebanon from Syria.

According to a communique issued by the Lebanese army “a military unit arrested at a check point in Arsal and another in Brital in Baalbek nine Syrians, who tried to infiltrate into Lebanese territories.”

Algeria, which was just elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, is the only North African country to "systematically" block visits by watchdogs, a Human Rights Watch official said in remarks published Friday.

"Algeria is the only North African country today which systematically blocks the visits of NGOs defending human rights, which freely and regularly visit Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco," the independent El-Watan newspaper quoted HRW's Eric Goldstein as saying.

In a cluster of white-washed houses on Morocco's north coast, newly-arrived Syrian families have found shelter thousands of miles from their ruined homeland but are struggling to rebuild their lives.

Since the summer, more and more Syrians have crossed from Algeria into Morocco without visas, part of the massive displacement caused by a conflict now thought to have killed more than 115,000 people and created the worst refugee crisis in nearly two decades.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's imminent visit to North Africa has been postponed, Algiers announced on Friday, just hours after the top U.S. diplomat flew to Geneva for Iranian nuclear talks.

Washington has yet to confirm the last-minute cancellation of the planned visit to Algeria and Morocco, which had been due to take place over the coming days.

The diplomatic ruckus between Morocco and Algeria over human rights in Western Sahara has revived the historic animosity between North Africa's arch rivals, as regional changes challenge a decades-old status quo.

Analysts say key factors explaining the rising tensions between the neighboring countries, whose differences are rooted in the Western Sahara conflict, include chronic instability in the Sahel region, and a possible leadership change in Algeria next year.

Syria's President Bashar Assad on Wednesday compared his country's war against rebels, whom he describes as "terrorists", to the conflict that devastated Algeria for an entire decade.

"The Algerian people's position on the Syrian conflict is not surprising, considering they had to undergo a challenge that was similar to the Syrian people's, which is currently facing terrorism," Assad said during a visit by an Algerian delegation to Damascus.