Six months after being welcomed as saviors in the Central African Republic, the 2,000 French soldiers in the country face growing hostility from a population accusing them of failing to curb interfaith violence.

France launched Operation Sangaris in its former colony in December to stop the violence that exploded after a March 2013 coup by the mainly Muslim rebels of the Seleka alliance in the majority-Christian country.

The head of the mission overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical arsenal urged Damascus on Wednesday to urgently hand over its remaining agents, and pressed countries with influence to intervene.

Under a deal backed by the United Nations and brokered by the United States and Russia after Washington threatened air strikes against Syrian government targets, the weapons were to be destroyed by June 30.

A former French Legionnaire, questioned during the course of the investigation into the 2012 murder of four people in the French Alps, committed suicide on Tuesday, police said.

Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud told Agence France Presse confirming information reported in the French media, that the former soldier had "left a note of six or seven pages in which he said he was disturbed by the questioning. He felt accused".

Frenchman Serge Lazarevic, kidnapped in Mali by al-Qaida in 2011, appeared in a video aired on Tuesday by Dubai-based Alaan television urging French President Francois Holland to act to secure his release.

Lazarevic, wearing a black turban, sporting a long beard and flanked by armed men, said the video was being recorded on May 13.

France on Tuesday increased its estimate of the number of its nationals embroiled in Syria's civil war to more than 800 and warned that they pose an unprecedented security threat.

The warning, from Prime Minister Manuel Valls, followed the weekend arrest of Medhi Nemmouche, a French jihadist suspected of carrying out last week's Brussels Jewish Museum killings after spending a year fighting in Syria.

French police arrested four people suspected of links with jihadist networks Monday, three days after detaining a man for last week's deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced the sweep on Europe1 radio but did not specify if the arrests in the Paris region and southern France were linked to the Brussels shooting suspect Mehdi Nemmouche.

A Frenchman who spent over a year in Syria has claimed responsibility for last week's deadly shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels in a video recording, prosecutors said Sunday.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who was arrested by customs agents on Friday on arrival in the southern French city of Marseille, is believed to have recorded the claim in a 40-second video found in his possession along with a Kalashnikov and a handgun.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott will visit France for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, before traveling to the United States and Canada, he said Saturday.

Abbott said he would join French President Francois Hollande and other heads of government at the British services at the Bayeux Cathedral and Cemetery and the international ceremony at Sword Beach, Ouistreham.

U.S. lawmakers urged France to break its contract to sell two warships to Russia and instead sell or lease them to NATO, which said Friday it was up to Paris to decide.

Three congressmen led by Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to the transatlantic alliance's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressing concern about the construction and sale to the Russian navy of two Mistral-class helicopter carriers.

After cognac's transformation into a Chinese status symbol, its lesser-known French cousins armagnac and calvados are hoping to establish themselves in lucrative Asian markets as demand wanes at home.

Cognac currently accounts for 67 percent of French spirit exports, but rival digestifs and eaux-de-vie are seeking to seize more of that market and offset slumping domestic sales as France's population becomes increasingly abstemious.