Saudi authorities on Wednesday beheaded a Pakistani man found guilty of smuggling drugs into the conservative Muslim kingdom, the interior ministry said.

The man was caught attempting to smuggle an amount of heroin hidden inside his stomach, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Saudi authorities beheaded by the sword on Tuesday a national convicted of murdering a woman after he tried to rape her, the interior ministry said.

Hussam al-Sharari was found guilty of slitting the throat of the woman who resisted his attempts to rape her after he sneaked into her house, it said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Saudi Arabia on Monday called for U.N. action to end Israeli strikes on Syria, describing the raids as a "dangerous violation" of the sovereignty of an Arab state, the official SPA news agency reported.

Israeli raids on Syrian targets near Damascus at the weekend killed at least 42 soldiers, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said.

Saudi authorities beheaded a Syrian man on Monday after he was convicted of drug trafficking, the interior ministry said.

Mohammed Khalaf was arrested "as he was smuggling a large amount of narcotic pills into the kingdom," the ministry said in a statement published by the official SPA news agency.

A new SARS-like virus has killed two more people in Saudi Arabia, taking the number of deaths from the coronavirus that the kingdom has announced to seven in one week, the health ministry said.

"The health ministry has announced that three infections by the new coronavirus have been registered during the past days in al-Ahsaa. Two of the victims have died while the third is in a stable condition," state news agency SPA said late Sunday.

Five Saudis who died after contracting a new SARS-like virus last week had not travelled abroad, a health ministry doctor said on Saturday.

"After questioning relatives, it turned out that none of these people had been abroad before being infected," Dr Ziad Mimish, who heads the ministry's disease prevention unit, told Agence France Presse.

Twenty people have died and four people remain missing in Saudi Arabia after heavy downpours triggered flash floods in the desert kingdom for nearly a week, the civil defense authorities said on Thursday.

People have drowned in several areas of Saudi Arabia, according to a statement by the civil defense quoted by SPA state news agency.

Five Saudis have died of a new SARS-like virus during the past few days and two more are being treated in an intensive care unit, the health ministry said.

In a statement cited by the Saudi SPA agency late on Wednesday, the ministry said that all the deaths occurred in the Ahsaa province in the oil-rich eastern region of the kingdom.

Kuwait's lower court on Wednesday sentenced a Saudi man to five years in jail for insulting the emir on Twitter, a human rights activist said.

The court passed the sentence on Abdulaziz al-Mutairi in absentia, as his whereabouts are currently unknown, the director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights, Mohammad al-Humaidi, told AFP.

Japan and Saudi Arabia condemned "grave" human rights violations by Syria's regime which they said has lost its "legitimacy", in a joint statement on Wednesday after a meeting of top officials.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived Tuesday in the OPEC kingpin, where he met with Crown Prince and Defense Minister Salman bin Abdulaziz.