President Vladimir Putin condemned Friday's jihadist attack on a hotel in Mali that killed 21 people including several Russians, the Kremlin and a foreign ministry spokeswoman said on Saturday.

In a message to Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, Putin "stressed that the inhuman crime committed in Mali's capital again confirms that terrorism knows no borders and is a real danger for the whole world," the Kremlin said in a statement.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel on Saturday said the decision to raise the terror threat level in the capital Brussels to the highest possible level was linked to an imminent threat of attacks.

Brussels shut its metro system, cancelled public events and urged residents to stay away from crowded areas, with a gunman still on the run after the Paris attacks which have sent jitters through Europe.

An angry mob in Pakistan's Punjab province torched a factory after one of its employees was accused of committing blasphemy, police officials said on Saturday.

Hundreds of people surrounded a chipboard factory in Jehlum city on Friday night and set the facility ablaze after reports surfaced that one employee had allegedly desecrated the Koran. 

Mali on Saturday began three days of national mourning and declared a state of emergency after a nine-hour siege by jihadist gunmen at a top hotel in the capital left 21 people dead.

The assault, claimed by Al-Qaeda affiliate the Al-Murabitoun group led by notorious one-eyed Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, ended after Malian and international troops stormed the luxury Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako.

North Korea on Saturday rejected a U.N. resolution on its human rights violations as a product of the hostile policy by the United States seeking to topple its socialist regime.

A U.N. General Assembly committee Thursday adopted by a record majority a resolution condemning "systematic, widespread and gross" human rights violations in the Stalinist state. 

Two Australian and four British tourists, along with their pilot, were killed when their helicopter crashed into a heavily crevassed glacier in New Zealand during bad weather on Saturday, police said. 

The sightseeing helicopter plunged into the Fox Glacier, a popular tourist site on the west coast of the South Island, with weather conditions reported to be heavily overcast and raining at the time.

As the hunt for jihadists widens after last week's Paris attacks, authorities in Greece warn it was virtually impossible to pick out dangerous extremists among arriving migrants, without prior intelligence.

"If they are not already registered in the database, it's nearly impossible," says Dimitris Amountzias, police captain in charge of Moria, Greece's main registration camp on the island of Lesbos.

Two men were kept from boarding a flight from Chicago to Philadelphia this week because they were speaking Arabic, one of several incidents reflecting public paranoia since the Paris attacks.

Maher Khalil and Anas Ayyad were told by a gate agent at Midway Airport on Thursday that they wouldn't be allowed on the plane because a fellow passenger had overheard them speaking Arabic -- and was afraid to fly with them. 

At least 21 people died in a fire at a mine operated by northeast China's biggest state-owned coal company, state media reported on Saturday, the latest accident in the country's trouble-plagued resources sector.

The fire broke out late Friday evening at a mine operated by state giant Longmay Mining Holding Group in Heilongjiang province's Jixi city, said the Xinhua news agency, which earlier reported 22 miners were trapped.

The U.N. Security Council will vote later Friday on a French-drafted resolution that would authorize countries to "take all necessary measures" to fight the Islamic State group.

The vote on the resolution at the 15-member council will take place one week after the devastating Paris attacks that left at least 130 dead and was claimed by IS extremists.