Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ruled out on Sunday a general amnesty for Kurdish rebels amid renewed peace talks between the country's secret services and jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.

"We are not entitled to pardon murderers. We will not interfere in such a thing," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

A huge car bomb blast in a mainly Shiite Muslim area of Karachi on Sunday killed at least 45 people, officials said, amid a spate of sectarian violence that has come as Pakistan prepares for elections.

The explosion blew the front off two five-story apartment blocks in the Abbas town area of Pakistan's largest city, setting one on fire and trapping people beneath piles of rubble.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, suffering from gastroenteritis, was admitted to hospital on Sunday, a Buckingham Palace spokesman told Agence France Presse.

All the 86-year-old's engagements for this week, including a visit to Rome, have been called off, the spokesman added.

Britain said Sunday that the reported killing of Islamist militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar would be a blow to terrorism in North Africa but would not represent the end of Mali's troubles.

Chad said its troops in northern Mali had killed Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Islamist leader who masterminded an assault on an Algerian gas plant that left 37 foreign hostages dead in January.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday condemned a NATO helicopter strike in which two brothers, both under seven years old, were shot dead after being mistaken for Taliban insurgents.

The two boys were tending livestock and collecting firewood in the southern province of Uruzgan when they were killed on Thursday in an incident that drew an abject apology from the NATO-led coalition.

A U.S. soldier was shot and injured by South Korean police after a dramatic car chase through the capital Seoul early Sunday, media reports said.

The 23-year-old Private First Class, who was not named, was shot in the shoulder shortly after midnight, Yonhap news agency said.

Nigeria's military said Sunday that it killed 20 Boko Haram Islamists while repelling an attack by the extremist group in the embattled northeastern state of Borno.

"Boko Haram terrorists attempted to attack a military barracks (in Borno) at about 5:00 am (0400 GMT)," spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Sagir Musa said in a statement.

At least 50 Al-Qaida-linked rebel fighters have been killed in recent days in clashes with French and Malian troops near the town of Gao in northern Mali, a Malian military source told AFP on Sunday.

"Fighting continues on Sunday morning some 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Gao between Islamists and Malian troops supported by the French army. We have the situation under control," said a Malian military source contacted by phone from the capital Bamako.

France said Sunday that one of its soldiers had been killed in fighting in northern Mali, in the third death of a French serviceman since the launch of its military intervention in mid-January.

The presidency said in a statement that the soldier, from the First Parachute Chasseur Regiment, was killed in combat on Saturday evening.

At least six people died in a spate of snow-related incidents as blizzards swept across the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido over the weekend, police and news reports said Sunday.

A 40-year-old woman and her three teenaged children were found dead late Saturday in a car buried under snow in the town of Nakashibetsu, eastern Hokkaido, a local police spokesman said.