Residents of the Islamist-held northern Mali town of Gao on Saturday killed a local jihadist leader to avenge the murder of a journalist, an official said.

Sema Maiga, a deputy of the town's mayor, said the Islamists beat local journalist Kader Toure to death after accusing him of "working for the enemy", adding that residents then "killed an Islamist chief called Alioune Toure".

Hundreds of people held a rally against racism and fascism in central Athens on Saturday as mourners gathered to pray over the body of a man killed in a suspected racist attack.

Nearly 3,000 people, according to state broadcaster NET, joined the peaceful protest organized amid a nationwide surge in xenophobic sentiment.

French President Francois Hollande Saturday came out in support of Algeria's deadly military strike against Islamist hostage-takers at a desert gas plant, saying the action was appropriate in the face of "coldly determined terrorists".

Other nations have criticized the hasty military backlash that left several expatriate workers dead, with Britain, Japan and Norway insisting they should have been forewarned of an army raid Thursday.

The U.S. State Department has ordered all family members of embassy employees to leave Mali, amid the country's escalating conflict with Islamist militants who control the vast arid north.

The order late Friday follows a tumultuous week in which gunmen across the border in Algeria staged a deadly raid on a remote gas plant, taking an unknown number of foreign hostages.

A dramatic four-day hostage crisis at an Algerian gas plant ended in a bloodbath Saturday when Islamists executed all seven of their remaining foreign captives as troops stormed the desert complex.

Twenty-one hostages, including an unknown number of foreigners, died during the siege that began when the al-Qaida-linked gunmen attacked the facility deep in the Sahara at dawn on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.

A suicide bomber and his accomplice were killed Saturday when their device went off in a botched attack on a district government headquarters in western Afghanistan, officials said.

The two attackers were riding a motorbike when they were blown up, but there were no other fatalities in the attack on Guzara district headquarters in Herat province, the district governor Nesar Ahmad Popal told AFP.

Two soldiers were killed and five others injured Saturday in an explosion in Okene city in Nigeria's central Kogi state, an army spokesman said, adding that they were part of the contingent set to be deployed to Mali.

"We lost two soldiers while five others were wounded when the IED (improvised explosive device) planted on their route went off and hit their convoy," Major General Bola Koleoso told Agence France Presse.

West African leaders Saturday called for greater international involvement in Mali as they met to speed up the deployment of regional troops to boost a French-backed offensive to halt an Islamist onslaught.

The emergency summit in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan was also attended by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius who clearly said it was time for the Africans to take over and "as soon as possible", adding that this was "the aim of our meeting."

U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday renewed his call on Congress to pass a series of measures aimed at reducing gun violence, but also reaffirmed his commitment to the right to bear arms.

"My administration is taking a series of actions right away - from strengthening our background check system, to helping schools hire more resource officers if they want them, to directing the Centers for Disease Control to study the best ways to reduce gun violence," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Saturday the United States would "take all necessary steps to protect our people" from the threat of al-Qaida-affiliated militants in Africa.

Discussing the Algerian hostage crisis in a BBC interview, Panetta commended France's military operation against Islamists in Mali and said Washington would assist other countries in trying to stop them making a base in the region.