Syria's state news agency SANA said on Saturday that a fake email had been sent out in its name claiming that Vice President Faruq al-Shara had been sacked.

Speculation has swirled since last week over the fate of Shara, the most high-ranking Sunni Muslim official in President Bashar Assad's Alawite-led regime, since the opposition claimed a week ago he had tried to defect.

Julian Assange will resume his broadcasts on Russian television once his legal troubles are over, a Russian television journalist said Saturday after meeting the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he has taken refuge.

"I spent an hour with him and we concluded that when all that is over, and I hope it ends soon, we will certainly resume cooperation with Assange," the editor in chief of RT (Russia Today), Margarita Simonian, told the daily Moskovskii Komsomolets.

Syrian forces launched a deadly assault in the southwestern belt of Damascus on Saturday, in what activists said was a new bid to crush "once and for all" the insurgency in the capital.

Combat helicopters and tanks also pounded rebel-held areas of the battered northern city of Aleppo, an Agence France Presse journalist and monitors said, as the army pressed on with its war against fighters seeking to topple President Bashar Assad.

Hussein Ali Omar, one of the 11 kidnapped Lebanese pilgrims in Syria by armed rebels, arrived in Beirut on Saturday.

Family members and several officials including Interior Minister Marwan Charbel gathered at Rafik Hariri International Airport to welcome Omar.

The head of the now-defunct U.N. observer team in Syria, General Babacar Gaye, left Damascus on Saturday after the Security Council called time on the troubled mission, his aides said.

The mission officially ended on at midnight last Sunday amid escalating violence and divisions at the U.N. Security Council over how to end a conflict now in its 18th month.

The body of a veteran Japanese war reporter killed while covering the anti-regime movement in Syria's second city was flown home on Saturday.

Mika Yamamoto apparently came under fire Monday from pro-government troops in Aleppo, which has borne the brunt of the conflict since fighting erupted there last month, according to her long-time colleague Kazutaka Sato.

New U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakdhar Brahimi said Friday that he was "scared" at the size of the task of ending the Syria conflict.

The former Algerian foreign minister made the comments as he started meetings with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other top officials and U.N. ambassadors before officially taking the place of Kofi Annan on September 1.

The U.S. Embassy in Beirut on Friday said it was “very concerned by the continuing violence in Tripoli,” adding that “Assad regime officials should be held accountable for involvement in alleged attempts to destabilize Lebanon.”

The embassy expressed its “sincere condolences for the loss of life,” calling on all parties to “exercise restraint and respect for Lebanese security and stability.”

Five gunmen in a Grand Cherokee SUV on Friday kidnapped Syrian national Ata Hassan Alloush, 32, state-run National News Agency reported.

NNA said the gunmen abducted Alloush from his vegetable greenhouse at the intersection of the Baalbek town of Iaat and took him to an unknown location.

August is already the deadliest single month of the Syria conflict with over 4,000 people killed, a watchdog said Friday, amid increasing macabre reports of dozens of bodies found bound and shot in the head.

At least 3,000 civilians and rebels have been killed in just over three weeks, in addition to 918 soldiers and 38 deserters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.