Two people were killed Friday when a bomb exploded outside a village mosque in the Russian Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria, the interior ministry said.

"A powerful explosion went off at 3:20 am in the village of Dugulubgei close to the village mosque... Fragments of the bodies of two unidentified people were found at the scene," the regional interior ministry said in a statement.

At least one person was killed early on Friday when a bomb exploded outside a village mosque in the Russian Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria, the regional interior ministry said.

"Today at 3:20 am in the yard of the mosque in the village of Dugulubgei... an IED exploded and human remains were found. The force of the blast blew out windows in nearby houses," the interior ministry said in a statement.

U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden says he did not bring any secret documents with him to Russia when he fled there, ensuring Moscow had no access to the files.

In an interview with The New York Times published Thursday, Snowden said he gave all the classified papers he had obtained to reporters he met in Hong Kong before flying to Moscow, where he later secured asylum.

A top Iraqi official said Thursday that Baghdad had begun receiving arms from Russia under a historic $4.3-billion deal it signed last year but then scrapped amid corruption allegations.

The October 2012 agreement promised to make Russia into Iraq's second-largest arms supplier after the United States.

The world's chemical weapons watchdog said Thursday that it had completed nearly half its inspections of Syria's arsenal, despite working against a background of car bombings and mortar attacks.

"We have done nearly 50 percent of the verification work of the facilities that have been declared to us," Malik Ellahi, a political adviser on Syria for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told journalists in The Hague.

International peace talks on Syria could be held next month, a top Syrian official said Thursday, although Russia quickly stressed that it was up to the United Nations to announce a firm date.

Asked at a press conference in Moscow if the talks have been pushed back to late November or early December, Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said they could take place "November 23-24".

Russia's chief negotiator on Iranian issues warned Wednesday there was "no reason to break into applause" after the latest round of talks on Tehran's disputed nuclear program concluded in Geneva.

"The results are better than what we had (in the previous round) in Almaty, but this does not guarantee further progress. There is no reason to break into applause," Russian news agencies quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying in the Swiss city.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced concern Wednesday to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the detention of 30 Greenpeace members who had protested Arctic drilling.

The environmental activists have been held on piracy charges in the northern region of Murmansk for almost three weeks after their ship Arctic Sunrise was seized by Russian security forces in a commando-style operation.

The father of Edward Snowden has left Russia after meeting the U.S. intelligence leaker at a secret location, the fugitive's lawyer said on Wednesday.

Lon Snowden had an "emotional" meeting with his son, who is wanted by U.S. authorities on espionage charges for spilling secrets about Washington's secret surveillance programs, after arriving in Moscow on October 10, Russian news reports said.

A senior Dutch diplomat at the Netherlands embassy in Moscow was beaten up at his home in the Russian capital by unknown attackers who scrawled the letters "LGBT" on a mirror, officials said Wednesday.

The incident comes amid growing tensions between Russia and the Netherlands over the arrest by the Russian authorities of the 30 crew of a Dutch-flagged Greenpeace ship campaigning against oil drilling in the Arctic.