Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday he had little confidence that key talks between Iran and world powers would succeed in resolving the standoff over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.

While Barak said the barrage of international sanctions imposed on Iran has clearly worked and forced the Islamic Republic to sit down and talk, he was not hopeful that the talks would lead anywhere.

Gunmen in Algeria's restive Kabylie region on Monday shot dead four policemen, less than two weeks ahead of legislative polls, a security official said.

The four were patrolling on the outskirts of Mekla town when another vehicle approached. The attackers "opened fire with Kalashnikov rifles and left them no chance to fire back. Two were killed and two were seriously wounded", the official said on condition of anonymity.

Former Libyan oil minister Shukri Ghanem died by drowning but there was no sign of another party being involved "so far", Vienna police said Monday, a day after Ghanem was found dead in the Danube.

"The death was by drowning... no signs of involvement by another party have been detected so far," police spokesman Roman Hahslinger told journalists, citing preliminary autopsy results.

Syrian anti-regime activist Yara Shammas, who faces the death penalty for "belonging to a secret organization," was bailed on Monday pending trial, said the director of the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research.

The judiciary, either "will issue a decision regarding the charges against her and she will be tried before the Criminal Court, or it will issue a declaration of her innocence and drop the charges," said Anwar Bunni, a human rights lawyer.

Campaigning for Egypt's presidential election next month officially began on Monday, with Islamists and liberal secularists expected to dominate.

Official campaigning, during which candidates can display their posters in public and broadcast their messages on television, will last until May 21, 48 hours before polls open for the first round of voting, on May 23 and 24.

More than 7,000 staff of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency in Jordan observed a one-day strike on Monday to demand better pay and conditions.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees, including teachers and medical staff, "demand a $140 salary raise and they do not want their annual bonus cut," UNRWA spokesperson Anwar Abu Sakinah told Agence France Presse.

Baghdad violence left six people dead on Monday, including a mother and her three children who were stabbed to death in their home, officials said.

A mother, her 13-year-old boy, and two girls aged five and seven were stabbed to death in the east Baghdad neighborhood of Kamaliyah on Monday morning, security and medical officials said.

More than 20 people were killed on Monday in blasts targeting security buildings in the city of Idlib, northwest Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The majority of those killed were members of the security forces, the Britain-based group said.

Bahrain's highest appeals court on Monday ordered the retrial of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a jailed opposition activist who has been on hunger strike since February 8, and other dissidents, their lawyer said.

"The court accepted the appeal (against the verdict of a special tribunal) and ordered a trial in the court of appeal," a civil court, Mohammed al-Jishy told Agence France Presse after a brief hearing.

Islamist militants have offered to free a British-South African hostage if London allows radical cleric Abu Qatada to choose a country for his extradition, U.S. monitoring service SITE said.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) also threatened that Britain would "open the door of evil" unto its country and people should it send the imam back to his native Jordan where he faces jail, the report said.