Masked gunmen on motorbikes killed five Egyptian policemen when they opened fire on a checkpoint south of Cairo on Thursday, the interior ministry said.

The ministry said two policemen were also wounded in the attack in the province of Beni Suef, which came two days ahead of the commemoration of the third anniversary of the 2011 uprising.

Morocco on Wednesday scrapped a highly controversial law allowing rapists of children to escape punishment if they marry their victims, as rights activists pressed the government to legislate to protect women from violence.

The amendment to Article 475 of the penal code, first proposed by the country's Islamist-led government a year ago, was adopted unanimously by lawmakers, parliamentary sources said.

The United States said Wednesday that Iran's absence from Syria peace talks would have no impact on the nuclear deal being brokered between Tehran and world powers.

Washington spent months laying the groundwork with Moscow and the United Nations for the Syria peace conference dubbed Geneva II, which opened Wednesday in the Swiss town of Montreux.

Egypt's military-installed authorities are quashing dissent and trampling on human rights, three years after the revolt which toppled Hosni Mubarak, Amnesty International charged Thursday.

"Egypt has witnessed a series of damaging blows to human rights and state violence on an unprecedented scale over the last seven months," Amnesty's Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said in a report, as Egypt prepares to mark on Saturday the anniversary of Mubarak's overthrow.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday discussed the need to integrate Sunni tribal leaders and troops into the Iraqi army with the Sunni speaker of Iraq's parliament Osama al-Nujaifi.

Obama dropped by a scheduled meeting with the speaker, Iraqi parliamentarians and Vice President Joe Biden, as the White House seeks to help Iraq quell an al-Qaida upsurge in key western cities in Anbar province.

A South Korean trade official who was kidnapped in Libya has been freed three days after he was taken hostage by armed men, a report said Thursday.

Han Seok-Woo, the head of the Libya unit of the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), was freed Wednesday by Libyan gunmen who were then arrested, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an official.

A top European Union official warned on Wednesday that both Israel and the Palestinians would have a "price to pay" if U.S.-led peace talks collapse.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, the EU's ambassador to Israel, also rebuffed charges by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Europe was showing a pro-Palestinian bias.

Air strikes against militant targets in Iraq's restive western province of Anbar killed at least 50 militants, the defense ministry said Wednesday.

Security forces "received accurate information and carried out painful and effective air strikes against terrorist gatherings in Anbar yesterday, January 21, that killed more than 50 terrorists," a ministry statement said.

Syrian troops shelled rebel positions and dropped barrel bombs on opposition-held areas Wednesday as an international peace conference opened in Switzerland, a monitoring group said.

President Bashar Assad's forces shelled rebel positions near the Saydnaya area north of Damascus, while fighting in Zabadani nearby killed at least 10 soldiers, including three officers, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Japan is ready to host confidence-building talks between members of Syria's rival camps if peace efforts launched this week bear fruit, a senior diplomat said Wednesday.

"We are ready to invite the people from both sides," Koichi Mizushima told reporters on the sidelines of a Syria peace conference in the Swiss city of Montreux.