A visit by Gaza's Hamas leader has angered the official Palestinian representatives in Tunisia who say they were ignored during the talks with the new government, a Palestinian source said Saturday.

Ismail Haniya, prime minister in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, visited Tunis Thursday to meet with the new moderate Islamist-led administration while he was on a tour of the region.

A top Arab League official said on Saturday the group has no plans to withdraw its observers from Syria where they are charged with assessing whether the regime is keeping a deal to end the deadly violence.

"No plan to withdraw the observers is on the agenda of the Arab ministerial committee meeting on Syria" in the Egyptian capital on Sunday, the pan-Arab body's deputy secretary general, Adnan Issa, told Agence France Presse.

Britain's newest warship is heading to the Gulf for its first mission at a time of tensions over Iran's threat to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a key transport route for oil.

The Royal Navy's Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring, which has a "stealth" design to help avoid detection by radar, is to join other British ships in the region, the Ministry of Defense confirmed Saturday.

Iran, Syria's main ally, on Saturday condemned a deadly suicide bombing in Damascus that left at least 26 people dead.

Iran "strongly condemns the terrorist attack on Friday in Damascus and sympathizes with the victims' families," foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying by the media.

Bomb attacks against police and Shiite pilgrims in central Iraq on Saturday killed four people, two officers and two worshippers, and wounded 10 others, officials said.

Moammar Gadhafi caused great suffering among the Sudanese people, Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir said Saturday on his first visit to Libya since Gadhafi was overthrown and killed.

Wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of genocide and war crimes in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, Bashir said that after Libya, Gadhafi inflicted the most damage in Sudan, the official WAL news agency reported.

Russia on Saturday said it was concerned after Egyptian prosecutors demanded a death sentence for fallen dictator Hosni Mubarak, calling for humanitarian factors to be considered.

"Such announcements are heard in Moscow with concern," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Former Egyptian prime minister and presidential hopeful Ahmed Shafiq was forced to flee a campaign rally after protesters threw chairs at him and demanded he leave the area, according to reports on Friday.

Shafiq, who has announced he was running for the top job, was addressing a rally in the impoverished Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba on Thursday evening when some residents began chanting for him to leave.

The Damascus-based chief of Hamas was instrumental in getting Syria to accept an Arab observer mission into the country, the head of the Arab League said on Friday.

Nabil al-Arabi was speaking in Cairo after talks with Khaled Meshaal, the exiled head of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

The United States condemned Friday's deadly suicide bombing which left at least 26 people dead in Damascus, the capital of violence-wracked Syria.

"We categorically condemn this attack," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.