Mali's coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo has pledged the safe release of three top African foreign officials stranded in Bamako after the putsch, an African Union source said Saturday.

AU Commission chief Jean Ping spoke to Sanogo on the phone on Friday and was assured the foreign ministers of Kenya and Zimbabwe, as well as a Tunisian secretary of state in charge of Arab and African affairs would return safely.

Foreign ministers from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, meeting in Tunis said Friday the Syrian crisis should be resolved in an "Arab framework" and opposed foreign military intervention in the country.

"We are all against military intervention in Syria, and we want the problem to be resolved in an Arab framework," Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem said after meeting with his Egyptian and Libyan counterparts, Mohamed Amr and Ashour bin Khayyal.

Tunisia's Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali said on Tuesday that Syria's Bashar al-Assad would not be welcome in his country, after the Tunisian president offered the Syrian leader asylum in Tunis.

"I respect our head of state but I do not want to see Assad in our country. And if I were to encounter him, I would put him in front of a court and hand him over to the Syrian people," Jebali told the website of German news weekly Der Spiegel.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul indicated Thursday that France will be invited to the next meeting of the "Friends of Syria" to be held in Istanbul despite a slump in ties over a genocide bill.

A distinction must be made between bilateral relations and an international conference," Gul said on a visit to Tunisia, after a Turkish diplomat said Ankara had not decided whether to invite France to the conference.

Tunisia has accepted that Saudi Arabia will probably never hand over ousted leader Zine el Abidine Ben Ali to face trial in his homeland, the new president said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday.

Former president Ben Ali has lived in exile with his wife Leila in Saudi Arabia since January 14, 2011, when he fled Tunisia amid an uprising that sparked a string of regional protests known as the Arab Spring.

Tunisia is ready to grant asylum to Syrian leader Bashar Assad as part of a negotiated settlement to the crisis, President Moncef Marzouki said in an interview to be published Wednesday.

Marzouki had last week called for judicial immunity for Assad and his family during an international conference on Syria held in Tunis.

From bold portraits to wry cartoons on the Islamist resurgence at the polls, a Paris show explores the roots and branches of Tunisia's revolution, one year on, as seen by home-grown artists.

Photographs, graffiti, paintings, videos and sculpture explore the issues spotlighted with the ouster of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: freedom of speech and religion, women's rights, the online world, democracy building and Islamism.

Russia on Monday slammed as "one-sided" last week's Friends of Syria meeting in Tunis that condemned Damascus for its crackdown and vowed further sanctions against the Syrian regime.

"The meeting that was held in Tunis was clearly one-sided... It is clear to us that this meeting did not help create conditions that would stimulate all sides to seek a political solution," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters.

More than 3,000 protesters rallied in Tunisia's capital on Saturday to call for the country's moderate Islamist government to resign after accusations that ruling party activists had defaced union offices.

The protesters demonstrated outside the headquarters of the country's main UGTT union, chanting "The people want the government's fall" and "Hands off my UGTT", before marching through the center of Tunis.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Tunisia's president on Saturday as she continued a tour of the region following a global meeting on Syria that ratcheted up pressure on Bashar Assad.

At the start of talks with President Moncef Marzouki, Clinton said the "Friends of Syria" meeting of more than 60 foreign ministers in Tunisia had been a success.