A Dutch couple kidnapped in Yemen six months ago have been freed in the capital Sanaa, state news agency Saba said on Tuesday in a report confirmed by the Dutch ambassador.

"Dutch journalist Judith Spiegel and her partner Boudewijn Berendsen, abducted since June 8 have been freed," Saba quoted a security official as saying.

The head of the world chemical weapons watchdog said on Tuesday the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons could begin in late January.

"We hope that by the end of January, the destruction on the American ship could start," the director general of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, told AFP.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel reaffirmed U.S. military ties with Qatar on Tuesday, during a regional tour aimed at shoring up Gulf alliances amid disagreements over policy on Iran and Syria.

Hagel met Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and his minister of state for defense, Major General Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, in Doha, following stops in Saudi Arabia on Monday and Bahrain last week.

Radical Islamist cleric Abu Qatada, deported by Britain in July after a near decade-long legal battle, pleaded not guilty as his trial in Jordan on terrorism charges opened on Tuesday.

"You know full well I am not guilty and that this accusation is false," Abu Qatada, in prison overalls, told the state security court in Amman.

Saudi authorities on Tuesday beheaded a man convicted of incest in the south of the conservative Muslim kingdom, the interior ministry said.

Hasan Ghazwani, a Saudi national, was executed in the city of Jizan, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Syria's army Tuesday turned its sights on the town of Yabrud, the last rebel stronghold in the strategic Qalamoun region near Lebanon's border, as it moved to open a key highway to Damascus.

The town is believed to be where a group of nuns from the historic Christian hamlet of Maalula have been transferred, reportedly in the hands of jihadist rebels from Al-Nusra Front.

Leaders of the oil-rich Gulf states converged on Kuwait Tuesday for a summit amid differences over a proposed confederation and ties with Iran.

The summit follows a rare public spat between bloc leader Saudi Arabia and Oman over Riyadh's proposal to upgrade the GCC into a union -- 32 years after its establishment.

A radical group linked to al-Qaida kidnapped two Spanish journalists reporting in Syria in September and is holding them captive, El Mundo newspaper reported on Tuesday.

El Mundo correspondent Javier Espinosa and Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, a freelance photographer, were seized on September 16 in Raqqa province, the Spanish daily said on its website.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is to fly back to Israel just days after his last visit amid a Palestinian warning that his proposals on security would lead to "total failure".

Kerry will head to Israel on Wednesday, five days after he landed back from Jerusalem and after spending most of the weekend meeting in Washington with Israeli leaders.

The United States knew that an al-Qaida-linked rebel group in Syria was capable of producing sarin gas but ignored it in blaming the Syrian regime for a chemical attack in August, a veteran U.S. journalist has charged.

In a long article published by the London Review of Books, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh accused President Barack Obama's administration of "deliberate manipulation of intelligence" in the Syrian chemical weapons affair to justify intervention.