Residents in the eastern city of Benghazi, cradle of the revolt that led to the ouster and death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, headed to the polls Saturday to elect a local council.

"This is a first step in the transition from revolution to state building," Suleiman Zubi, head of the local electoral committee, told Agence France Presse.

Around 200 protesters rallied on Saturday in front of the Turkish consulate in Basra, southern Iraq, threatening to boycott Turkish companies if Ankara does not hand over Iraq's fugitive vice president.

The demonstrators set fire to a Turkish flag, shouting, "No, No, Turkey!" and "Throw the Turks out!" amid a chill in ties between the neighboring countries.

An Iraqi anti-terror officer, his wife and three children have been shot dead by gunmen in north Baghdad, security and medical officials said on Saturday.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car outside security headquarters in Syria's biggest eastern city on Saturday, killing nine people and wounding 100, state media said.

The attack was the the first of its kind in Deir al-Zour since an anti-regime uprising broke out in Syria in March 2011, and the deaths there came as at least another 10 people died elsewhere in the country.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon has no "hard" proof that al-Qaida was behind bomb attacks in Syria but is very concerned that terrorist groups are taking advantage of strife in the country, his spokesman said Friday.

Ban said on Thursday that he believed the group founded by the late Osama bin Laden carried out suicide bomb attacks in Damascus on May 10 which left at least 55 dead and nearly 400 wounded.

Regime forces fired on protesters who took to the streets of Aleppo on Friday, wounding several people at the biggest rally seen in Syria's second city since a revolt erupted last year, as at least 20 people were killed across the country, a rights group and activists said.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said security forces killed nine people in the central province of Homs, three in the central province of Hama, three in the northwestern province of Idlib, two in the southern province of Daraa, two in the northern province of Aleppo and a person in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

Thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran on Friday to protest a proposed union of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, in the first step toward closer links among six Arab monarchies across the Gulf.

The authorities had urged citizens to protest what was called an "American plan to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia and express their anger against the lackey regimes of al-Khalifa and Al-Saud," the dynasties ruling the two countries.

Kofi Annan, the special U.N.-Arab League envoy to violence-torn Syria, plans to return to Damascus "soon" to further efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, his spokesman said on Friday.

Ahmed Fawzi said no date had been set for Annan's second trip to Syria since he was named special envoy.

The U.N. human rights body said on Friday that a panel of experts will travel to Libya next week to investigate the use of mercenaries in last year's conflict.

The group will hold talks with government officials, civil groups and private military and security companies from May 21 to 25.

Three near-simultaneous bomb blasts at a pet market in east Baghdad killed five people on Friday, officials said, just hours after an attack in the city's southeast left five dead.

The explosions, which occurred at around 7:00 am (04:00 GMT) in the Maamal area, also wounded at least 31 other people, the security and medical officials said.