Bulgaria's veteran Turkish minority party leader Ahmed Dogan resigned as expected Saturday, but not before he foiled a dramatic attack by a man armed with a gas pistol at his party's national conference in Sofia.

Dogan was addressing delegates of his Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) party when a tall man in black leapt onto the stage, rushed to his podium and pointed the non-lethal weapon at his head, video footage showed.

A Yemeni tribunal specializing in terrorism began Saturday the trial of 21 suspected members of al-Qaida, including three Jordanians and an Egyptian, accused of attacks against security forces.

The defendants, who appeared in four separate groups, one comprised of the Jordanians and Egyptian, have been charged with "belonging to a criminal gang linked to al-Qaida to carry out attacks against the state police and the army," the indictment read at the hearing said.

Leading Republican Senator John McCain said on Saturday night that Washington could be doing more to back the "effort" of the Syrian people in ending the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Speaking at the beginning of a meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres, McCain recalled his visit to a refugee camp in Jordan earlier that day, "to see the suffering of the Syrian people up close".

West African leaders Saturday sought urgent U.N. aid for a regional force to fight Islamists in Mali as President Francois Hollande said French troops would remain as long as needed to stamp out "terrorism".

The emergency summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional bloc also called on member states and Chad, which has pledged 2,000 troops, to put words into action without haste.

Residents of the Islamist-held northern Mali town of Gao on Saturday killed a local jihadist leader to avenge the murder of a journalist, an official said.

Sema Maiga, a deputy of the town's mayor, said the Islamists beat local journalist Kader Toure to death after accusing him of "working for the enemy", adding that residents then "killed an Islamist chief called Alioune Toure".

Hundreds of people held a rally against racism and fascism in central Athens on Saturday as mourners gathered to pray over the body of a man killed in a suspected racist attack.

Nearly 3,000 people, according to state broadcaster NET, joined the peaceful protest organized amid a nationwide surge in xenophobic sentiment.

Some 200 Palestinians gathered on Saturday at a new encampment in a West Bank village, protesting for the second consecutive day Israel's intention to confiscate land.

"We have settled on the lands of the Beit Iksa village to prevent its confiscation by the Israeli army," Osama Zayed, village resident and one of the organizers of the initiative, told AFP.

French President Francois Hollande Saturday came out in support of Algeria's deadly military strike against Islamist hostage-takers at a desert gas plant, saying the action was appropriate in the face of "coldly determined terrorists".

Other nations have criticized the hasty military backlash that left several expatriate workers dead, with Britain, Japan and Norway insisting they should have been forewarned of an army raid Thursday.

The U.S. State Department has ordered all family members of embassy employees to leave Mali, amid the country's escalating conflict with Islamist militants who control the vast arid north.

The order late Friday follows a tumultuous week in which gunmen across the border in Algeria staged a deadly raid on a remote gas plant, taking an unknown number of foreign hostages.

A dramatic four-day hostage crisis at an Algerian gas plant ended in a bloodbath Saturday when Islamists executed all seven of their remaining foreign captives as troops stormed the desert complex.

Twenty-one hostages, including an unknown number of foreigners, died during the siege that began when the al-Qaida-linked gunmen attacked the facility deep in the Sahara at dawn on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.