By Tom Perry and Yousri Mohamed CAIRO/ISMAILIA (Reuters) - Seven Egyptian security men kidnapped by Islamist militants in Sinai last week were freed on Wednesday and President Mohamed Mursi vowed to pursue a crackdown on lawlessness in the desert peninsula. The abduction underlined the threat posed by jihadists who have exploited a security vacuum that opened up in the isolated Sinai after the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. The state has struggled to restore order there since.

Police in Kenya have shot dead two suspected "terrorists", a man and woman who used a baby as a shield during a raid in which several police sustained grenade injuries, an officer said Sunday. Police said they staged the raid Saturday night on a house where the two were holed up on the outskirts of the capital Nairobi. "We received information that they were planning an attack. And as soon as we got to know their hide-out, we swung into action," Augustine Nthumbi, police chief for Nairobi's Kasarani suburb and the leader of the operation, told journalists Sunday.

An American utility company has begun the construction of the first solar power plant in electricity-starved Guinea-Bissau, officials said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Rui Duarte Barros on Tuesday laid the first stone of Suntrough Energy's $30 million (23 million euro) photovoltaic station on outskirts of the capital of the west African nation, his office said. "This facility will help us to solve the energy issue and will also create 200 jobs," Barros said at the ceremony, according to a press statement released by Suntrough.

An American was stabbed in the neck as he came out of the US embassy in central Cairo on Thursday, a security official told AFP. The American was rushed to hospital after the attack in Cairo's Garden City neighbourhood near Tahrir Square, which houses several embassies and has seen a rise in crime and unrest in recent months. Police guarding the embassy managed to arrest the assailant, described only as "an unemployed man" by the security official, who requested anonymity. The motive for the attack and the condition of the victim national remain unclear.