Tunisia's hardline Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia vowed on Thursday to go ahead with its annual congress at the weekend in defiance of a government ban on the controversial gathering. "We are not asking permission from the government to preach the word of God and we warn against any police intervention to prevent the congress from taking place," spokesman Seifeddine Rais told a news conference in Tunis.

A video distributed Thursday by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights shows jihadists in the east of the country executing supporters of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The Britain-based watchdog did not specify whether the men killed were combatants, nor did it say when the footage was shot. The men killed by Al-Nusra Front, a jihadist organisation operating in Syria that the United States has classed as "terrorist" "are supporters of the Assad regime, but we cannot know whether they were regime troops", watchdog director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The White House released 100 pages of emails Wednesday designed to defuse Republican claims of a cover-up over the attack on the US mission in Benghazi last year that killed four Americans. The documents show the development of the Obama administration's narrative in the frantic and confusing days after the attack on September 11 last year that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens.

An Al-Qaeda-linked cell broken up in Egypt at the weekend planned to bomb the US and French embassies in Cairo, state news agency MENA quoted investigators as saying on Wednesday. "The accused planned suicide car bombings outside the embassies of France and the United States in Egypt," MENA said In the case of the French mission, the motive was to register a protest "against French military intervention in Mali," investigators were quoted as saying. The news agency did not say why the American embassy was to be targeted.