President Michel Suleiman urged officials on Friday to resort to dialogue in order to resolve any dispute or problem.

He expressed relief for the adopted measures in the northern city of Tripoli, hoping that the tranquil security situation would remain in the city.

Kofi Annan, the special U.N.-Arab League envoy to violence-torn Syria, plans to return to Damascus "soon" to further efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, his spokesman said on Friday.

Ahmed Fawzi said no date had been set for Annan's second trip to Syria since he was named special envoy.

Syrian authorities have sentenced to death for "treason" an activist who was arrested in April and "brutally tortured," a Syrian human rights group said on Friday.

The death sentence is apparently the first to be reported since an uprising erupted last year against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which has struck back by trying to crush dissent with deadly force.

The whereabouts of the six militants who had escaped the Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp remains unknown, reported al-Joumhouria newspaper on Friday.

It said that it is likely that they headed to the northern city of Tripoli before heading to Syria to take part in the revolt against the country’s ruling regime.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon said Thursday he believes al-Qaida committed a major bomb attack in Damascus that left dozens dead, and that up to 10,000 people have now been killed in Syria.

Ban said President Bashar Assad has still not implemented a peace plan agreed with U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

Only hours after the Lebanese army intercepted the weapon-laden ship Lutfallah II off Tripoli’s coast, the Lebanese media was buzzing with reports attributed to security and political officials and claiming that the Lebanese army had received intelligence information from “major Western states,” with some saying that the U.S. was behind the intelligence tip-off.

The reports spoke of an arms shipment destined for the Syrian opposition, which Washington feared would end up in the hands of pro-Qaida gunmen practicing their activities in Syria and Lebanon – which further allowed the army to intercept the ship and seize its cargo.

Prominent Palestinian writer Salameh Kaileh said on Thursday the Syrian authorities deported him this week to Jordan after three weeks of detention and torture over his anti-regime writings.

"Syrian intelligence raided my house and arrested me on April 23. I was suddenly deported to Jordan on Monday after a three-week detention and torture," Kaileh told Agence France Presse in Amman.

Syrian authorities on Thursday handed over to the General Directorate of General Security three suspects allegedly involved in the 2011 abduction of seven Estonian nationals in Lebanon.

General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim earlier on Thursday informed President Michel Suleiman that the suspects would be handed over shortly.

Russia cautioned Western powers on Thursday against launching "hasty" wars that could lead to the rise of radical Islamist factions and even result in regional nuclear wars.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a legal forum ahead of his visit to the G8 summit as Russia's official representative at Camp David that Moscow noted numerous examples of powers infringing on the sovereignty of other states.

The Local Coordination Committees (LCC), a network of activists on the ground in Syria, threatened Thursday to pull out of opposition bloc the Syrian National Council over its "monopolization" of power.

The threat came after Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun was reelected head of the exiled coalition in the face of opposition by some members of the secretariat and rules that require the president's rotation every three months.