A German aid worker who was kidnapped in Pakistan over two years ago has been released in neighboring Afghanistan, Berlin said on Friday.

"The government is very relieved that a German national who was kidnapped more than two years ago in Pakistan has been freed in Afghanistan," a foreign ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

France and Germany on Thursday pressed for urgent reforms to the European Union's visa-free Schengen travel zone to counter the increasing number of Europeans leaving to wage jihad in Iraq and Syria.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve led the impassioned plea to EU counterparts at a meeting in Luxembourg, calling for "a European PNR (Passenger Name Record) ... and a more efficient system of checks at airports.

Over 1,000 Kurds again took to German streets overnight, watched by riot police, a day after 23 people were hurt in clashes between Kurds and radical Muslims, police said Thursday.

In the latest protests in the northern port city of Hamburg, police confiscated weapons including machetes, baseball bats and one gun but managed to avoid large-scale confrontations.

German police said Thursday they had found 330 kilograms (727 pounds) of heroin, the biggest single drug bust in several decades, in a truck shipping pickled cucumbers and garlic from Iran.

Street clashes between hundreds of Kurds and radical Muslims in Germany's northern port city of Hamburg left 14 people wounded overnight, police said Wednesday.

On a dusty firing range outside the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Arbil, peshmerga fighter Ardalan Aziz Hamad hefts his new German-made assault rifle and is clearly impressed.

A convoy of more than 100 trucks carrying humanitarian aid has left Germany for war-torn eastern Ukraine, the German ministry of economic cooperation and development said Saturday.

The convoy should arrive in mid-October and on October 14 Cooperation Minister Gerd Mueller is also expected to head to the city of Kharkiv, which remains under government control.

Germany hopes to send 200 soldiers to Ukraine to help protect the OSCE mission monitoring the ceasefire in the restive east, the Bild newspaper reported Saturday. 

Fifty members of the parachute regiment would be among the contingent, which must still be approved by Germany's parliament, the daily said, without naming its sources. 

Germany has approved new deliveries of weapons to several Arab countries, including Qatar which had been accused of backing jihadists, according to a newspaper report Thursday.

Pro-Russian insurgents launched a fresh assault Thursday on an airport held by isolated Ukrainian forces as a month-old truce came under renewed strain and calls grew for the Kremlin to help halt the bloody revolt.

Ukraine also dispatched its energy chiefs to Brussels in a bid to convince the European Union to back up Kiev at crunch talks with Russia on the latest energy war with its westward-leaning but effectively bankrupt neighbor.