Al-Qaida is moving from Iraq to Syria, where the government is carrying out a bloody crackdown on an uprising, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview published on Friday.

"Al-Qaida has started migrating from Iraq to Syria, and maybe it will migrate from Syria to another country, to Libya or to Egypt or to any region where the regime is unstable and out of control," Maliki said in an interview with Saudi daily Okaz.

The Syrian regime may have won the battle of Baba Amr against lightly armed rebels, but spreading protests indicate this victory on the ground is unlikely to clear the country's political impasse, analysts said on Friday.

The small district in the central city of Homs had become a symbol of the almost year-long uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

A Spanish court has agreed to extradite a fugitive Egyptian businessman who is on trial for corruption along with ousted president Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian foreign ministry said on Friday.

Spain has informed the Egyptian ambassador in Madrid that a Spanish court "has agreed to hand Hussein Salem and his son Khaled to Egypt," spokesman Amr Roshdy said in a statement.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Friday demanded that Syria unconditionally let in humanitarian aid and said the government was "afraid" to let in the U.N. emergency aid chief into the country, as an aid convoy was denied access to the battered Baba Amr district of Homs.

"The Syrian authorities must open without any preconditions to humanitarian communities," Ban said.

Paris prosecutors on Friday opened a preliminary murder probe into an attack on a media center in Syria's Homs in which a French photographer was killed and a French journalist wounded.

The February 22 rocket attack in Homs' Baba Amr district killed French photographer Remi Ochlik as well as veteran Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, and wounded Le Figaro reporter Edith Bouvier of France and British photographer Paul Conroy.

Egyptian newspapers angrily accused the ruling military on Friday of caving in to U.S. pressure to allow foreign NGO workers, including a number of Americans, to escape trial on charges of illegal funding.

One of them also accused the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) of trashing the concept of an independent judiciary, insinuating that it had strong-armed the courts into lifting a travel ban on the suspects.

Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated against Syrian President Bashar Assad in a protest on Friday in the mostly Sunni town of Heet, condemning a bloody crackdown by his regime.

The protesters, who gathered outside al-Faruq mosque in the center of the western town, shouted slogans describing the Syrian leader as a "coward" and "the enemy of God," and called for violent resistance against his rule.

France will close its embassy in Syria to denounce the "scandalous" repression by President Bashar Assad's regime, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday at the close of an EU summit.

French Foreign Minister "Alain Juppe and I have decided to close our embassy in Syria," Sarkozy told a news conference.

Israel is keeping the option of military action against Iran open if the international community does not halt its suspected nuclear weapons drive, Foreign Minister Avidgor Lieberman said Friday.

"We are still waiting. We want to believe that the international community will be able to handle this threat... But again we keep all options on the table," Lieberman said when asked about the possibility of a strike on Iran.

The U.N. rights body appealed to Syria on Friday to respect international law after receiving unconfirmed reports of 17 "grisly" executions as forces overran Baba Amr in the city of Homs.

"We are alarmed at reports starting to come out of the Babr Amr district of Homs after it was taken over by Syrian forces yesterday," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.