Exiled former Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade made a controversial homecoming with security forces on high alert on Friday, two years after he lost office in an election marred by violent protests.

Wade, 87, who held power from 2000 to 2012, landed in Dakar late in the evening, his first time in the west African nation since he moved to France after a bitter defeat to arch rival and current leader Macky Sall.

The Gambia reopened its borders with Senegal on Friday, ending a week-long diplomatic stand-off between the west African neighbors, officials said.

The move came just four days after security sources told Agence France Presse that President Yahya Jammeh had ordered the closure of all official crossing points into the Gambia's only neighbor.

Senegalese security forces were braced Friday for the controversial homecoming of exiled former President Abdoulaye Wade, two years after he lost office in an election marred by violent protests.

Wade, 87, who held power from 2000 to 2012, was expected to land in Dakar in the afternoon, aides said, for his first trip back to the west African nation since he moved to France after a bitter defeat to arch rival and current leader Macky Sall.

The bodies of five presumed migrants thought to have been trying to reach Spain were found on Sunday on northern Morocco's shoreline, local authorities said.

"The bodies of five probably illegal migrants, four of them from Senegal, were washed up from the Mediterranean" in the Nador area, MAP news agency cited officials as saying.

Russia on Thursday demanded the immediate release of a trawler and its crew seized by Senegal for alleged illegal fishing off the country's coast, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

At a meeting with Senegal's acting charge d'affaires, Russian diplomats made "a firm demand to the Senegalese authorities to immediately release the Russian fishing trawler, the Oleg Naydenov, and its crew," spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told Rossiya 24 television.

Senegal's Ousmane Sow, who sculpted Nelson Mandela as a goalkeeper extending his hand "to keep corrupt African heads of state at bay", was on Wednesday honored in his adoptive France.

At a ceremony in Paris, Sow -- the first African to be invited to join France's Academy of Fine Arts -- dedicated the honor to "all of Africa, its diaspora and the great man Nelson Mandela".

Mali's government is confident that the shaky security situation in the desert north will not stop nationwide legislative elections from going ahead later this month, a minister said in an interview published Sunday.

"We believe that things can improve by November 24 as far as the legislative elections are concerned," Cheick Oumar Diarrah, minister of northern reconciliation and development, said in an interview with TV5 Monde, Radio France Internationale (RFI) and the influential daily Le Monde.

Germany's first two lawmakers of African origin cheered their victory as trailblazers Monday after winning in weekend elections.

Senegalese-born Karamba Diaby, 51, will represent Halle, an eastern city of 230,000 people, for the Social Democrats in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

More than 1,000 alleged victims of former dictator Hissene Habre are suing him in Senegal, where he is being tried for genocide during his eight-year rule of Chad, their lawyers said on Wednesday.

Habre, 70, faces accusations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture during his brutal rule between 1982 and 1990, when some 40,000 people were killed, according to rights groups.

Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre appeared in court Tuesday after his arrest in Senegal by investigators seeking to put him on trial for crimes against humanity.

Habre -- once dubbed "Africa's Pinochet" -- also faces accusations of war crimes and torture during his eight years in power in Chad, where rights groups say 40,000 people were killed under his rule.