Militants who launched a brazen daylight assault on the Yemeni defense ministry that killed 56 people were mostly Saudis, investigators said on Saturday.

The finding, in a preliminary report on the inquiry into Thursday's attack, adds credibility to a claim of responsibility by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was formed from a merger of the jihadist network's Saudi and Yemeni branches.

The lawyer for 21 Egyptian women and girls jailed over an Islamist protest told appeal courts Saturday there was no evidence of their guilt and urged judges to free them.

Wearing handcuffs but holding red roses, the 21 appeared in Alexandria courts in white prison garb in a case that has sparked an outcry.

Officials from organizations with health-related missions in Syria called Friday for the protection of medical facilities and personnel there.

A joint statement by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N.'s humanitarian operations "strongly condemned" attacks on health facilities.

Diplomacy with Iran must be backed up by U.S. military might, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel said Saturday in a speech addressed to Gulf allies anxious over a nuclear deal with Tehran.

Hagel promised the United States would maintain a 35,000-strong force in the Gulf region, as well as an armada of ships and warplanes, despite the recent deal with Tehran.

At least 17 people, including children, have been killed by regime forces in a shelter in the town of Nabuk, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

Citing activists inside the town north of Damascus, the watchdog said the bodies of the civilians were found in Nabuk's Al-Fatah district.

A group of nuns reportedly abducted from Syria's Maalula appeared Friday in a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, in which they reassured that they are in good health and would be released “in two days.”

“We are fine. We're staying at a beautiful villa and we'll leave in two days,” says one of the nuns in the video.

Demonstrators calling for democratic reform clashed with police Friday in Shiite villages near Manama ahead of an international forum on Middle East security, witnesses said.

A Shiite-led uprising to demand changes in the Sunni-ruled kingdom was crushed in March 2011 but almost weekly protests against the authorities have been since staged in Shiite villages around Manama.

A Moroccan court Friday acquitted three teenagers accused of public indecency after pictures of two of them kissing were posted on Facebook, but reprimanded the couple, their lawyer told Agence France Presse.

The teens had risked possible prison sentences of five years under the kingdom's penal code, in a case that drew strong criticism from international rights groups and sparked a storm of online protest in socially conservative Morocco.

Jordan was Friday elected to a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council, taking the seat that Saudi Arabia won and then rejected in a protest over Syria's civil war.

Jordan, which will take up the seat on January 1, won 178 votes from among the 193 members of the U.N. General Assembly and was the only candidate put forward for the vacant post.

An Egyptian prosecutor on Friday ordered the detention for two weeks of a Coptic Christian activist and journalist arrested on suspicion of inciting religious strife, state media reported.

Bishoy Armia, a convert to Christianity, made headlines in 2008 when he lobbied to have his religion changed from Islam on his national identification card.