Two Turkish pilots kidnapped near Beirut's airport in August were shown in a video broadcast by LBCI television on Tuesday, saying they wished they could be back home.

The video showed Murat Akpinar and Murat Agca both saying they were in good health but adding that they wished they could be home with their families for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha that began on Tuesday.

Jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan said Monday he was still hopeful a peace deal with the Turkish state was possible but argued that Ankara needed to shift the process into a new gear.

"The process that we started last year has great meaning," the leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) said in a statement relayed by pro-Kurdish lawmakers who visited him in prison.

Iraqi Kurdistan is prepared to strike militants anywhere, including neighboring Syria, but the Kurds must avoid being drawn into its civil war, the autonomous region's president Massoud Barzani told AFP.

Barzani's remarks came after militants carried out a late-September attack on a security service headquarters in the Kurdish region's capital Arbil, killing seven people -- a rare occurrence in an area usually spared the violence plaguing other parts of Iraq.

Talks to reunify the divided island of Cyprus are set to restart soon as diplomats eye a settlement to an issue that has long poisoned Turkey's attempts to become a European Union member.

The fate of the long-divided Mediterranean island remains one of the major stumbling blocks in Turkish-EU negotiations.

General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim expressed hope on Saturday that the case of the abducted nine Lebanese pilgrims, who were being held in Syria's Aazaz region, would reach an end soon.

Ibrahim rejected to go into details in remarks published in As Safir newspaper, pointing out that negotiations are ongoing.

The president of Cyprus called Friday for "new impetus" in a fresh round of peace talks with the breakaway Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC).

"We have to be well prepared for a new round of talks ... We are in total agreement (with Athens) that a new impetus is needed in the (upcoming) negotiations," Nicos Anastasiades told reporters after meeting Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras in Athens.

Turkey has imposed financial sanctions on some 350 people and dozens of organizations that have been blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council for alleged links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The move, made public late Thursday, would freeze any assets those individuals or groups may have in Turkey.

Turkey's parliament on Thursday extended for one year a mandate that would allow Ankara to order military strikes against Kurdish rebels holed up in neighboring northern Iraq.

The vote coincides with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's reforms to boost the rights of the country's sizable Kurdish community and secure an end to the nearly 30-year battle with the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel has denied reports about an imminent release of nine Lebanese pilgrims held captive by rebels in Syria since May 2012.

In remarks to al-Liwaa newspaper published on Wednesday, Charbel said there has been “ huge optimism” that the nine men would be released “but we cannot set a date and time.”

Turkey violated national newspaper Cumhuriyet's freedom of expression when it prevented further publication of an interview given by the current President Abdullah Gul to Britain's The Guardian in 1995, the European rights court ruled Tuesday.

In April 2007, in the run-up to presidential elections, Cumhuriyet had reproduced a quote from the interview that Gul, a candidate in the elections, had given to The Guardian 12 years earlier.