Mali's Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra arrived in Paris on Monday for talks with senior officials on plans for a military intervention to dislodge Islamists in control of the vast north.

Diarra's office said he would meet Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday to discuss "French support for reclaiming regions illegally occupied by terrorists".

Gunmen attacked a Nigerian police unit believed to be holding suspected Islamist extremists in the capital Abuja on Monday, killing two officers and leading to the escape of 30 detainees.

Authorities however claimed to have re-arrested 25 of the 30 escapees and said no one being held on "terror-related charges" was freed.

A Mauritanian news website on Monday published images of a French citizen kidnapped last week by one of the armed Islamist groups controlling the north of neighboring Mali.

Two photos published on the site Alakhbar showed the man, identified as Alberto Rodriguez Leal, 61, with his head bowed, wearing a blue shirt and flanked by two armed men dressed in kakhi robes.

The head of Italy's Democratic Party, Pier Luigi Bersani, has won the first round of a primary to lead the center-left into a general election early next year, an organizer of the vote said Monday.

Bersani garnered 44.9 percent of the vote compared with 35.5 percent for his main rival, Florence mayor Matteo Renzi, said Nico Stumpo, national coordinator of Sunday's election in which more than three million center-left voters took part.

A high-profile Pakistani journalist and television anchor escaped an assassination bid on Monday when police defused a bomb planted under his car in Islamabad, police and his channel said.

Hamid Mir, who hosts the Capital Talk evening show on Geo television and writes a column for the biggest-selling newspaper Jang, was criticized by the Taliban last month in the wake of the shooting of teenage activist Malala Yousafzai.

Ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy was set Monday to wade into a bitter leadership battle that is threatening the future of France's main right-wing opposition party, the UMP.

The political heir of the party founded by Charles de Gaulle after World War II was on the verge of collapse after accusations of vote-rigging tarnished a leadership vote.

Catalan leader Artur Mas scrambled for allies to govern Monday after a snap election slashed his majority, hobbling his campaign for nationhood and a split from Spain.

Mas' decision to call the vote two years early looked like a gamble gone horribly wrong after voters turned out in massive numbers to trim his majority, not to boost it.

Gunmen sought to attack a special police unit in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Monday as a police spokesman claimed the assailants were "repelled".

"I can confirm that there was an attempted attack on the (special anti-robbery squad) this morning which was repelled," spokesman Frank Mba said, adding that the attackers were "suspected gunmen".

Philippine police said they had charged four men Monday over the stabbing death of a U.S. diplomat's husband during a brawl just outside an exclusive compound in the nation's capital.

The father of three was walking into the compound early on Saturday morning when he saw security guards at its gates checking the identification of the suspects, who were inside a luxury sports utility vehicle, police said.

Bangladesh firefighters battled a new blaze at a garment factory Monday as the country prepared for a day of mourning after the death of 110 workers over the weekend in the export industry's worst accident.

The second fire broke out at a 12-storey facility on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, with some workers trapped on the roof in a further reminder of the dangerous conditions faced by thousands of poorly paid garment stitchers.