Five British Greenpeace activists and one Canadian flew out of Russia on Friday following an amnesty which halted their prosecution for a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic, the environmental group said.

The activists took off on a plane heading for Paris from Saint Petersburg's Pulkovo airport precisely 100 days after they were first detained in September, a Greenpeace spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Russia was Friday to bury Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the iconic AK-47 assault rifle that was the favored weapon of guerrillas worldwide, at a newly-opened cemetery for national heroes.

Kalashnikov, who died on Monday at the age of 94, was to receive a funeral with full state honors and be buried at the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery (FVMK) in Mytishchi outside Moscow, the defense ministry said.

A delegations from al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc Christian lawmakers will head on a trip to several countries to address the conditions of Christians in war-torn Syria amid the dangers confronting them.

Al-Mustaqbal MP Atef Majdalani said in comments published in An Nahar newspaper on Friday that the decision was taken by the bloc and will be implemented as soon as possible.

The head of Russia's national security council on Thursday cast doubt on the scheduled date for the start of Syria peace talks next month because of slow progress in the run-up to the parley.

"We will not be able to hold the conference within the initially given time frame," Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview with the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

A Russian cargo plane crashed into a military warehouse complex in Siberia on Thursday, killing all nine people on board, the emergencies ministry said.

The Antonov An-12 military transport plane, carrying cargo from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, crashed into storage warehouses at a military unit near Irkutsk, also in Siberia.

Russia on Thursday started issuing visas to foreign crew members of a Greenpeace protest ship and dropped the criminal case against the last member of the 30-strong team.

Italy's Christian d'Alessandro was notified by investigators that the case against him had been dropped, Greenpeace said. Earlier this week, Russia closed the cases of the other 29 crew members of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship under a Kremlin-backed amnesty.

Russian forensic experts studying the remains of Yasser Arafat on Thursday said the Palestinian leader died a natural death, ruling out radiation poisoning.

"We have completed all the studies," Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia's Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA), told a news conference.

French authorities have given permission for a new Russian Orthodox church to be built near the Eiffel Tower, a project that has been blocked since 2010, the Russian embassy said Wednesday.

The plan for the church dates back to 2007 when Alexy II, the now deceased patriarch of Moscow, visited France and said the Russian Orthodox church wanted a bigger edifice in Paris.

Russia's supreme court on Wednesday agreed to review the two sets of convictions against Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky following his surprise early release from prison and lightning transfer to Germany.

Russia's former richest man was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin last week just eight months before his scheduled release after more than a decade behind bars.

Russia was on Wednesday dropping most of the cases against 30 Greenpeace crew members of an Arctic protest ship, marking the "final chapter" of a three-month criminal probe, the environmental group said.

Twenty five foreigners were summoned to the Investigative Committee where they expect to receive confirmation that the hooliganism probes launched after their September protest against oil drilling in the Barents Sea are dropped, Greenpeace said.