Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi named a liberal Christian, a hardline Islamist and a woman as assistants Monday as he sought to reach out beyond his power base in the Muslim Brotherhood to rival groups.

Morsi's appointments, announced just before he left for China on a key trip abroad, were seen as a balancing act between Egypt's Coptic minority, which has felt threatened by Morsi's Islamist roots, and the Brotherhood's ultra-conservative Salafist rivals.

Egyptian authorities have denied entry to the daughter of the jailed symbol of the Bahraini opposition movement, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Cairo airport sources said on Monday.

Maryam al-Khawaja flew straight back to Copenhagen after arriving in Cairo on Sunday, having been denied entry "for security reasons," the sources said.

Egypt on Sunday defended its idea of forming a regional contact group on Syria which would include Iran, a staunch Damascus ally, insisting that Tehran could "be part of the solution" to the Syrian crisis.

President Mohammed Morsi proposed at this month's Organization of Islamic Cooperation summit in Mecca creating such a group made up of Egypt and Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two countries supporting the rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's regime.

Egyptian security officials and witnesses said a man was killed in an explosion near the border with Israel on Sunday, with some accounts saying he was trying to fire a rocket into Israel.

Witnesses said he was killed in an explosion as he tried to fire a rocket, and as an Israeli military drone hovered in the sky above its side of the border.

An Egyptian man was reported to be in stable condition after he set fire to himself on Saturday outside the presidential palace in Cairo to protest against losing his job, police officials said.

The employee at a state-owned electricity company had won a court ruling to get back his job, but the company ignored the verdict. He doused himself in petrol and set himself alight as a last resort, the officials said.

Non-Aligned Movement leaders should take a stand against Western sanctions at a Tehran summit at the end of the month, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Sunday, adding that many NAM members backed Iran's nuclear program.

"The NAM... should seriously confront unilateral sanctions of certain nations against some members of the NAM," Salehi said in a speech opening days of preparatory meetings for the summit on Thursday and Friday.

Egypt decided on Saturday to reopen a border crossing with Gaza it had mostly kept closed since a militant attack killed 16 of its soldiers on August 5, the official MENA news agency reported.

It said the Rafah border crossing, the Palestinian territory's only passage which bypasses Israel, would return to opening six days a week, like before the attack.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has no immediate plans to restore ties with Iran, his spokesman said in comments published Saturday ahead of a landmark visit to Tehran later this month for a Non-Aligned Movement summit.

"The matter (of restoring diplomatic ties) is out of the question at this stage," Yasser Ali told the Saudi-owned newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in an interview also carried by Egyptian media.

Egyptian military engineers have blocked 120 tunnels used for smuggling to and from the Gaza Strip since the start of operations in the neighboring Sinai Pensinsula, security officials said on Saturday.

"Tunnel entrances are being demolished every day and the operation will continue until all underground passageways are shut," one official told Agence France Presse.

Several hundred protesters rallied on Friday in Cairo against President Mohammed Morsi, a much smaller turn out than hoped for by activists bent on challenging the country's first Islamist president.

In Cairo's Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands rallied to overthrow president Hosni Mubarak early last year, several dozen of Morsi's opponents briefly clashed with his supporters before withdrawing, witnesses said.