The head of Saudi Arabia's religious police admitted the presence of extremists within its ranks, labeling them "advocates of sedition" and vowing to remove them, local media reported Tuesday.

Sheikh Abdullatif al-Sheikh's comments come the day after King Abdullah decreed jail terms of up to 20 years for citizens who travel to fight abroad, as the kingdom struggles to deter young Saudis from becoming jihadists.

Negotiators working to secure the release of a South African man kidnapped in Yemen by al-Qaida said Tuesday they had lost contact with the group, just days before a ransom deadline.

"We are in a very difficult period concerning Pierre Korkie," said Imtiaz Sooliman, president of the Gift of the Givers charity organisation.

The employment minister of Canada, a strong supporter of Israel, has waded into the spat over Oxfam breaking with U.S. actress Scarlett Johansson for endorsing an Israeli soft drink firm that operates in the occupied West Bank.

Minister Jason Kenney, who is also minister of multiculturalism in Canada, extended an ironic thank you to Oxfam for bringing the Israeli firm SodaStream to his attention.

Syrian army helicopters dropped barrel bombs on main northern city Aleppo Tuesday, killing at least eight people as they pressed a bombing campaign launched in mid-December, a monitoring group said.

More than 150 people have been killed in Syria's onetime economic hub over the past four days, in a string of barrel bomb raids and other air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Saudi authorities beheaded two citizens on Tuesday after convicting them of two separate murders, the interior ministry said, bringing the number of executions in the kingdom this year to seven.

Abdulellah al-Otaibi was executed in the western city of Taif after he was convicted of stabbing a member of his own tribe to death, the ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SPA.

A firefight between security forces and suspected Islamists holed up in a building in the Tunisian capital left a policeman and seven militants dead, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.

"Seven terrorists died. A member of the National Guard was killed and another wounded," a ministry source told Agence France Presse.

German-based broadcaster Deutsche Welle said Monday that it will show across the Arab world a TV program by a popular Egyptian satirist who has ruffled feathers at home.

Deutsche Welle plans to show Bassem Youssef's "Al Bernameg" series on its international Arabic channel and online immediately after its first screening on the MBC Egypt channel.

Human Rights Watch urged Kuwait on Tuesday to amend laws that officials are using to crack down on free speech and send people to jail for criticizing the country's ruler.

HRW also called on Kuwaiti authorities to fulfill their promises to resolve the decades-old problem of over 100,000 stateless people, or bidoons, who claim the right to citizenship.

Syria's opposition leader met Russia's top diplomat on Tuesday in a bid to persuade Moscow to push its ally Damascus to agree to a transitional government for the war-scarred nation.

The talks between Syrian National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov came after an inconclusive 10-day peace conference in Geneva concluded on Friday without a commitment from Damascus to attend a new round of negotiations set for February 10.

An Israeli army officer was killed overnight in a friendly-fire incident along the Gaza border, the military said on Tuesday.

The officer had been taking part in a "routine operation" near the border fence between northern Gaza and Israel, a spokesman said.