Violence killed at least 69 people, including 38 civilians, in Syria on Thursday after one of the bloodiest days of the 15-month revolt left nearly 150 dead, a human rights watchdog said.

Two bombs exploded outside the Palace of Justice in central Damascus on Thursday, state television reported.

A criminal court on Thursday jailed for 15 years each a former Mubarak-era cabinet minister and a businessman for selling Israel natural gas below market value, a judicial source said.

"The Cairo criminal court sentenced former oil minister Sameh Fahmi and fugitive businessman Hussein Salem to 15 years in prison each over the (Israel) gas deal," the source told Agence France Presse.

The opposition Syrian National Council said on Thursday that it will not join any interim government until President Bashar Assad quits after diplomats said peace envoy Kofi Annan was pushing the idea.

"The opposition has not yet received the details of the Annan proposal and cannot reply to it," SNC spokesman George Sabra told Agence France Presse by telephone.

Russia said Thursday it backed a political transition in Syria but rejected Western pressure to call for the exit of President Bashar Assad, ahead of international talks on ending the spiraling conflict.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov poured cold water on hopes that world powers have already agreed a common strategy ahead of the weekend talks in Geneva, saying Moscow was opposed to any solution imposed from abroad.

Turkey is sending missile batteries and army vehicles to the border with Syria as a "security corridor,” almost a week after the Syrian downing of a Turkish military jet, media reports said Thursday.

There was no official confirmation of the reported military moves.

Violence killed at least seven people in Syria on Thursday morning after one of the bloodiest days of the 15-month revolt left nearly 150 dead, a human rights watchdog said.

Four people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Douma when troops surrounded the town, meeting fierce resistance from rebel fighters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Bahraini security forces are searching for three suspects believed to be planning "terror" attacks in the kingdom and harboring materials used to make explosives, media reports said on Thursday.

Bahraini security forces had "identified three suspects believed to be involved in these terror activities... for whom there is a search operation underway," public security chief Tareq Hasan told reporters in Manama late Wednesday, according to the state news agency BNA.

Yemeni forces have arrested a cell of al-Qaida operatives suspected of carrying out a suicide bombing in Sanaa in May that killed more than 100 troops, a security official was quoted as saying Thursday.

"Security forces have captured (members of) the terrorist cell behind the attack on Sabeen Square," national security chief, Ali Mohammed al-Ansi, was quoted as saying by 26 September, a daily owned and published by the ministry of defense.

A series of attacks in the Iraqi capital and to its north killed at least 14 people and wounded more than 50 others on Thursday, security and medical officials said.

A car bomb in a popular Baghdad market killed eight people and wounded 30, while another killed two people and wounded 15 in Taji, 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of the capital, the officials said.

International envoy Kofi Annan has proposed setting up a Syrian transitional authority that could include followers of President Bashar Assad and opposition members in a bid to end the country's war, diplomats said Wednesday.

Russia and the other major powers -- the United States, Britain, France and China -- back the plan, which will be discussed at a meeting of foreign ministers Annan has convened in Geneva on Saturday, they said.