Four people were killed in clashes pitting Toubou tribesmen against a brigade linked to the Libyan army in the southern town of Kufra, a military official told AFP on Wednesday.

"Four Toubou tribesmen were killed on Tuesday in clashes against Shield Libya," an army force made up of former rebels, the official said.

Libyan Islamist leader Ahmed Abu Khattala said on Monday that a man was killed and another injured when planting a car bomb in a bid to assassinate him.

"One person was killed and another was wounded as they were planting a bomb in my brother's car with the aim of assassinating me," he said of the Sunday night incident.

Mohammed Megaryef, president of Libya's national assembly, has escaped an attack on his hotel in the southern oasis of Sabha in an incident his spokesman on Sunday called an assassination attempt.

"The hotel he was staying in was attacked for three hours. There was sniper fire. It seems to have been an assassination attempt," the assembly chief's spokesman, Rassmi Beruwien, told Agence France Presse of the incident that happened on Thursday.

A Moammar Gadhafi-era security official has been killed in Libya's second city Benghazi, local officials said Saturday, in the latest attack highlighting a lack of security in the east of the country.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser al-Magrabi was found dead on his farm last night," an official in Benghazi's criminal investigations department told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The acting head of the criminal investigations department in Libya's second city Benghazi has been kidnapped at gunpoint, officials told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

"Abdelsalam al-Mahdawi was kidnapped late Wednesday when travelling from his farm to the criminal investigations department," a security official told AFP.

Two Libyans were killed on Wednesday when fighting erupted between rival tribes in the southern oasis of Sabha, a local official told AFP.

"Two people were killed in clashes today," said Ayub al-Zarroug, president of the local council of Sabha, 750 kilometers (465 miles) south of Tripoli.

Libya has dropped arrest warrants and travel bans slapped by the toppled regime of Moammar Gadhafi against the slain dictator's opponents, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP on Wednesday.

"All arrest warrants and travel bans issued by the former regime against Gadhafi's opponents have been lifted," Mejdi al-Orfi said.

South Korean activists launched balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border Tuesday as North Korea joined a global party by greeting the New Year with fireworks.

About 30 activists released seven balloons carrying 28,000 leaflets in the northern border town of Gwanjeonri in Cheorwon County, shouting "Down with North Korea's dynastic dictatorship!"

The U.S. State Department made a "grievous mistake" in refusing to shut down its mission in Benghazi, Libya, despite the deteriorating security situation in the country, a Senate report said Monday.

The diplomatic post was kept open "despite the inability of the Libyan government to fulfill its duties to secure the facility and the increasingly dangerous threat environment that American intelligence described," U.S. lawmakers concluded.

An improvised bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the public prosecutor in the Libyan city of Benghazi causing material damage but no fatalities, a security source said Monday.

"Initial evidence suggests the device was a suitcase packed with high yield explosives (TNT)," an investigator at the scene told Agence France Presse, adding that there were no casualties.