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.

Syria's state media said Monday that government troops repulsed a rebel attack on a police school in the northern city of Aleppo, one day after President Bashar Assad called on Syrians to fight an opposition driven by what he characterized as religious extremists.

The official SANA news agency said regime forces killed and wounded members of a "terrorist group" in the fighting late Sunday, but did not provide a number. The government and the pro-regime media refer to the rebels seeking to topple Assad as terrorists.

Yemeni authorities impounded 500 illegal motorbikes in a three-day campaign to put an end to hit-and-run shootings which killed dozens of security officers last year, officials said on Monday.

"The campaign has succeeded in stopping 500 unlicensed motorbikes and 72 cars without number plates, some of which are suspected to have been used in assassinations," an interior ministry report said, adding that 50 weapons such as Kalashnikovs and other firearms were seized during the crackdown.

Kuwait's lower court on Monday handed a two-year jail term to an opposition tweeter for allegedly insulting the emir in the second such sentence in as many days, a human rights activist said.

"Ayyad al-Harbi was sentenced to two years in jail," director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights Mohammad al-Humaidi said on his Twitter account.

Iran on Monday threw its weight behind a plan outlined by Syrian President Bashar Assad to end the civil war in his country, reiterating Tehran's solid support for its most important regional ally.

"The Islamic republic... supports President Bashar Assad's initiative for a comprehensive solution to the country's crisis," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in a statement on his ministry website.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi told CNN Sunday he backs Syrian calls for Bashar Assad to be tried for war crimes, and predicted Assad's regime would fall in the country's bloody civil war.

"The Syrian people, through their revolution, and through the movement will, when the bloodshed stops, move to a new stage where they will have an independent parliament and the government of their choosing," Morsi said, according to excerpts released by the network.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's road map to end the civil war ravaging his country is "detached from reality" and he should step down, the U.S. State Department said Sunday.

Assad's speech "is yet another attempt by the regime to cling to power and does nothing to advance the Syrian people's goal of a political transition. His initiative is detached from reality," spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

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.

Syrian President Bashar Assad accused Palestinian groups he did not identify on Sunday of treating the country like a "hotel", in his first public speech in seven months.

Assad praised every "honorable Palestinian in Syria who has served (the country's interests alongside) his Syrian brother and not treated Syria like a hotel, leaving it when circumstances become difficult."

Egypt's minority Coptic Christians celebrate on Monday their first Christmas under Islamist rule and amid a climate of fear and uncertainty for their future.

"I do not really feel safe," says Ayman Ramzi, who feels his community threatened by the rise of Islamists in the world's biggest Sunni Arab nation.