British police on Wednesday said they had arrested two people at London's Heathrow Airport on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

A man and a woman, both aged 26, were detained by officers from the counter-terrorism command at 8.30 pm (1930 GMT) Tuesday after arriving on a flight into the airport, according to a Metropolitan Police statement.

The world should tighten the squeeze on Iran over its "mad" nuclear plans to the point where the regime's survival is threatened by its own people, Britain's defense secretary said Sunday.

Philip Hammond told The Observer newspaper that there were signs the regime was beginning to "fracture" on the issue of its disputed nuclear program.

Radical Islamist preacher Abu Hamza and four other terrorism suspects are set to be extradited to the United States after a British court Friday rejected their last-ditch attempts to block their removal.

A legal saga that has dragged on for more than a decade in the courts of Britain and Europe finally ended when two senior judges at the High Court in London dismissed the men's pleas to be allowed a stay of extradition.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Thursday in a visit to the Iraqi capital that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime is "doomed" and should not survive.

"We believe that the Assad regime is doomed, that it is not possible for it to survive, and so many crimes (have been) committed that it should not survive," Hague said at a joint news conference with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

France and Britain have agreed on the need to speed up the transition from President Bashar Assad's regime in Syria to a new government, French President Francois Hollande said on Thursday.

"David Cameron and I are in total agreement -- we must accelerate the political transition (and) help the opposition to form a government," said Hollande, after talks with the British prime minister in London.

A plainclothes policewoman stood outside the suspected British home of a family shot dead in their car in the French Alps, an Agence France Presse reporter at the scene said on Thursday.

The policewoman was posted outside the spacious detached house in a leafy residential district of Surrey, southwest of London, while a Surrey police spokeswoman said the force was assisting French authorities in the investigation.

Ecuador said it would resume talks with Britain this week over the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is holed up in Quito's London embassy in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden.

State media late Tuesday quoted Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino as saying that talks with London "will resume this week," after Britain had earlier said it hoped to restart negotiations as soon as possible.

British Prime Minister David Cameron reshuffled his ailing coalition government Tuesday, but kept unpopular finance minister George Osborne and foreign minister William Hague in their jobs.

While most of the cabinet big hitters emerged unscathed, Cameron promoted culture minister Jeremy Hunt, who has battled calls to resign over his closeness to Rupert Murdoch's media empire, to the health ministry.

Britain expressed grave concern on Sunday at reports that several hundred bodies have been found in a town near Damascus following a fierce assault by the Syrian army.

"I am deeply concerned by emerging reports of a brutal massacre of civilians in Daraya, in the outskirts of Damascus," said junior foreign minister Alistair Burt.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa said he believed his country had overcome a diplomatic spat with Britain over its threat to enter the Ecuadoran Embassy in London in order to arrest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

"We believe that this unfortunate incident is over," said Correa. "It was a mistake for the British Foreign Office to say that they would enter our embassy."