A Cairo court Monday acquitted a cousin and former aide of slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi of the attempted murder of two Egyptian police, judicial sources said.

Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam was detained in Cairo in March following a gunfight with Egyptian policemen in his apartment and was held despite Libyan demands for his extradition.

Moroccan police violently suppressed a peaceful protest in the Western Sahara against a planned EU fishing accord with Rabat that covers the disputed territory's waters, witnesses said Monday.

About 50 demonstrators, many of them women, gathered in the Laayoune city center on Saturday evening carrying banners and chanting slogans, including "stop taking our resources," one witness told Agence France Presse by phone.

U.N. rights experts demanded Monday that Baghdad get to the bottom of what happened to seven Iranian opposition members missing since a September attack on a refugee camp in Iraq.

"We call upon the government of Iraq to speed up the investigations in order to disclose the fate and whereabouts of the individuals," the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances said in a statement.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius played down expectations Monday for next month's talks in Geneva on the Syrian conflict, saying he doubted they would mark a breakthrough.

The "Geneva 2" meeting is slated for January 22 and aims to bring together Syria's opposition and President Bashar Assad's regime to try to end the country's nearly three-year civil war.

U.S. proposals on security presented by Secretary of State John Kerry will lead to the "total failure" of peace talks with Israel, a senior Palestinian official told Agence France Presse on Monday.

"These ideas will drive Kerry's efforts to an impasse and to total failure because he is treating our issues with a high degree of indifference," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a top official with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, referring to the U.S. diplomat's proposals on future security arrangements in the Jordan Valley.

Jihadist fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have executed a man in Syria's Idlib province after accusing him of blasphemy, a monitoring group said Monday.

"ISIL executed Ibrahim Qassum, a heating oil vendor, by shooting him in the head... on allegations of blasphemy, two days after their forces arrested him," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian regime troops have regained control of the key Damascus-Homs highway after seizing most of the town of Nabak in the Qalamoun region, a monitoring group said on Monday.

Syria's Al-Watan newspaper meanwhile said authorities had taken full control of Nabak and expected to reopen the highway shortly.

Attacks including a car bomb near a cafe and another at a police station killed 22 people in Iraq on Monday, as the country struggles to curb rampant violence.

Unrest has reached a level this year not seen since 2008, when Iraq was just emerging from a period of brutal sectarian killings, and the surge in violence has raised fears the country is falling back into all-out conflict.

Kuwait's lower court on Monday acquitted 70 opposition activists including nine former MPs of charges of storming the parliament building in the oil-rich Gulf state two years ago.

"All the defendants were found not guilty" of charges of storming a public building, assaulting police, resisting orders and damaging public property, in the ruling by judge Hisham Abdullah.

Syrian opposition leader Ahmad Jarba said in Kuwait on Monday he would visit Russia at Moscow's invitation, but gave no date for the trip.

The announcement comes as Russia and the United States drum up support for their joint initiative to get all parties to the Syrian conflict to join peace talks slated for January 22 in Geneva.