The European Union on Friday insisted that Ukraine free jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko if it expects to sign a deal bringing Kiev closer to Europe.

"Requests from the EU on Tymoshenko's case are still on the table," Lithuanian President Dalia Gribauskaite told reporters at a regional forum in Yalta in southern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government on Wednesday approved a draft of an Association Agreement with the European Union, which would be Kiev's first step towards membership, ahead of its possible signing at a summit in November.

Kiev is hoping to sign the agreement at the EU's Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius in November, in a move which risks raising the temperature in relations with former Soviet master Moscow.

Ukraine sees no obstacle towards signing an Association Agreement with the European Union that would be Kiev's first step on the road to membership, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said Friday.

"As of today, I do not see any obstacles to the signing of this document," Yanukovych said in a major television interview broadcast on Ukrainian national channels.

Ukrainian police said on Tuesday they had found weapons in the offices of feminist movement Femen, which the group denied and slammed as the latest provocation by the authorities.

Kiev police released a statement, saying that police had received an anonymous call saying that explosives had been planted at an address in the Ukrainian capital, which is where the Femen group's office is located.

A Palestinian from Gaza who was snatched from Ukraine and is being held in an Israel prison has begun refusing food, a prison spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Dirar Abu Sisi "was on the third day of a hunger strike, following which all his personal items and electric appliances were removed from his cell, except for a fan," Israel Prison Service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman told Agence France Presse.

Lawyers for jailed Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko on Wednesday said they would appeal her seven year sentence on abuse of power charges to the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

Her defense said they could make the appeal based on a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that detention of the former prime minister was arbitrary and unlawful.

Thousands attended a funeral Tuesday for victims of a coach crash in Italy as the country mourned the 38 dead in one of Europe's worst road accidents.

Flags flew at half-mast and shops stayed shut on a national day of mourning as investigators probed why the coach plunged off a viaduct near Naples on Sunday.

A Ukrainian man charged with the "terrorist-related" murder of an elderly Muslim man has also been charged over three mosque bombings in central England, a court heard on Tuesday.

Pavlo Lapshyn, a 25-year-old postgraduate student from the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, was arrested last week as part of the investigation into the explosions.

British counter-terrorism police said Friday they had found evidence of a three-week-old explosion outside a mosque in central England, one of a spate of similar attacks in recent months.

The Wolverhampton central mosque was evacuated on Thursday night following the arrest of two Ukrainian men suspected of involvement in explosions at two other mosques in the area.

Ukrainian security forces on Friday broke up a demonstration by hundreds of people in central Kiev protesting against police brutality after the alleged rape of a woman in the south of the country by two officers.

Around 200 people turned out on Kiev's Independence Square Thursday evening for the protest, many clutching pictures of relatives who they claimed have been tortured or beaten by the Ukrainian security forces.