The Moroccan foreign ministry summoned Algeria's ambassador Tuesday to protest its alleged expulsion of Syrian refugees across their common border, in the latest spat between the feuding neighbors.

Algeria has already rejected the accusations, saying on Monday that its border guards had merely refused to allow Syrian nationals deported by Morocco onto its territory.

The U.N.'s Western Sahara envoy met Morocco's foreign minister Monday, official media reported, during a new tour of the region to push for a peaceful resolution to the frozen conflict.

Christopher Ross was received by Salaheddine Mezouar and his deputy Mbarka Bouaida, Morocco's MAP new agency said, without giving further details of the meeting.

Sorcery, plate-smashing and animal sacrifice are not often associated with Sufi festivals, but they all feature at a popular annual pilgrimage to a Moroccan shrine linked to the "queen of the genies".

In the town's main square, to a chorus of trilling pipes and banging drums, spectators press around a cluster of believers, who sway to the hypnotic rhythms in a trance-like state, sometimes leaping up and down in ecstasy, sometimes cutting themselves on the scalp with sharp tools.

Thirteen Moroccan immigrants held in a migrant center on the outskirts of Rome have sewn their lips together in the second such protest at their lengthy detention, Italian media reported Sunday.

The men, aged between 20 and 30, had already stitched their mouths shut in a week-long protest in December over their long stay in a supposedly short-term detention facility.

Moroccan has uncovered a jihadist cell led by a Spanish army veteran who later fought in Afghanistan with al-Qaida, the interior ministry said on Saturday.

The cell was active in the north of Morocco, where Spain retains two sovereign enclaves, and around Marrakesh in the south, the ministry said in statement carried by the MAP national news agency.

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.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed "diabolical" and "treacherous" Arab countries for a protracted surge in nationwide violence in a speech on Sunday, but stopped short of naming individual countries.

The premier said suicide bombers were coming to Iraq from as far afield as Morocco, Libya and Yemen, but did not single out countries he described as "evil" which he said were supporting violent extremists in Iraq.

Muslim nations urged the international community Saturday to put pressure on Israel to stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, as the end of talks in Morocco.

The call was issued by the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Committee amid heightened concern that the settlements undermine U.S.-brokered peace talks that resumed in July after bogging down three years earlier over the construction drive.

Young protesters have clashed with Moroccan security forces in Laayoune, the main city of Western Sahara, torching a police vehicle, a rights activist in the disputed territory said on Tuesday.

The protesters hurled petrol bombs at the security forces who threw rocks in response and chased them, said Hamoud Iguilid from the Moroccan Association of Human Rights.

A Turkish Airlines plane en route to Sao Paulo made an emergency landing in Morocco Sunday after a bomb warning, an airline official told Agence France Presse.

The plane landed at Casablanca Airport after taking off from Istanbul, the official told AFP.