Pakistan has imposed a one month moratorium on executions during Ramadan, officials said Sunday, providing temporary reprieve for a death row prisoner whose lawyers claim he was a juvenile at the time of the crime.

On Wednesday, Pakistan hanged one man allegedly tortured into confessing to murder as a minor -- despite international condemnation -- and rejected an appeal from another, Shafqat Hussain, sentenced to hang for killing a seven-year-old boy in 2004. 

Warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition struck Saturday rebel positions in Yemen as warring parties from the impoverished nation prepared for U.N.-sponsored Swiss talks, witnesses said. 

Air raids targeted Shiite Huthi rebels in the central province of Dhamar, as well as air defense positions of allied troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, witnesses said.

Canada offered Friday to take in Raif Badawi, a jailed Saudi blogger who faces flogging, listing him as a priority immigrant on humanitarian grounds so that he might rejoin his family already living in the country.

The province of Quebec cleared the way for his coming to this country by offering Badawi a so-called immigration selection certificate.

A rocket fired from Yemen killed one civilian and wounded another at a mosque during Friday prayers in the Saudi border region, the Saudi-led coalition said.

"They fired one missile, a Katyusha... at the time of Friday prayer," Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assiri, the coalition spokesman, told AFP.

UNESCO condemned the destruction Friday of ancient houses described as a "jewel" of Islamic urban landscape in an alleged Saudi-led air strike on the Yemeni capital's old quarter that killed five people.

The incident occurred before Yemen's warring factions are to meet Sunday for U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva in their first bid to break a deadlock after more than two months of Saudi-led air strikes.

A coalition bombing rebels in Yemen for more than two months will continue until a U.N. resolution calling for a rebel pullback takes effect, Qatar's foreign minister said on Thursday.

Khalid al-Attiyah spoke after chairing a meeting of his counterparts from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Saudi Arabia on Thursday condemned foreign criticism of a 1,000-lash sentence that the kingdom's highest court upheld against a blogger, rejecting "interference" in its internal affairs.

The kingdom "has expressed strong disbelief and condemnation" at statements about the case of Raif Badawi, the Saudi Press Agency said, citing an official source at the foreign ministry.

Two Saudi Arabian airport workers have been jailed for four years each and will be lashed 1,000 times for sexually harassing two teenage Iranian boys, a report said on Wednesday.

Saudi news website Sabq said a criminal court in the Red Sea city of Jeddah issued the verdict.

Iran on Wednesday offered condolences to the families of four Saudis who died from an apparent accidental chemical poisoning during a pilgrimage in Iran, after Riyadh summoned Tehran's ambassador over the incident.

Thirty-six Saudis on a pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Mashhad were hospitalized Sunday morning, suffering from nausea and dizziness, Abdullah Bahrami, the director of the Imam Reza hospital, was quoted as saying by official news agency IRNA.

Saudi Arabia on Wednesday beheaded a Pakistani convicted of heroin smuggling, despite arguments by rights experts that use of the death penalty in such cases violates international law.

Nazir Ahmed Sultan Ahmed was found guilty of smuggling the drug in his intestines, the interior ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.