Heavy gunfire was heard for several hours late Thursday at a military base near the capital of strife-torn Central African Republic, a French military source told Agence France Presse.

"There was automatic gunfire, with heavy artillery, during several hours at the army base at the airport," the source said on condition of anonymity. "It's confusing, it happened at night. For the moment, we don't know what happened."

Russia's most famous prisoner and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Friday arrived in Germany a free man after more than 10 years behind bars, in a whirlwind release hours after his surprise pardon by President Vladimir Putin.

The former oil tycoon was escorted out of his prison in northwestern Russia, in a hush-hush operation worked out behind the scenes with the German government and brokered by Berlin's former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday rejected opposition calls for him to step down after thousands of protesters massed in the capital calling for fresh elections.

The strongman leader said that there would be "no re-election", dismissing opposition allegations that the July election was tainted by vote rigging.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed a decree granting a pardon to Russia's former richest man and bitter Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, allowing his release after more than a decade in prison.

In a shock remark after his annual marathon news conference on Thursday, Putin had said that Russia's most famous prisoner had asked for clemency on humanitarian grounds as his mother was ill.

Gunmen opened fire outside Manila international airport Friday, officials said, killing four people including the mayor of a town in the southern Philippines, where political violence is endemic.

Terrified men and women screamed and cried while a man, apparently fatally wounded, lay face down on the pavement outside the passenger terminal in a video clip uploaded to the local GMA television network's website.

A man was dragged from his car by armed Australian riot police who stormed the vehicle after a tense two-hour standoff outside the New South Wales parliament on Friday.

Parliament went into lockdown and surrounding streets were cordoned off after the man drove a white car, believed to contain a container of flammable liquid, onto the footpath in front of the building.

The ceiling of a packed London theater collapsed on the audience during a hit show on Thursday, wounding 76 people including children and leaving terrified theatergoers covered in blood and rubble.

A sell-out crowd of around 720 people was in the Apollo Theater watching "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" when ornate masonry and rigging fell some five stories onto their heads.

North Korea has threatened a "merciless" strike against the South after activists burned effigies of the ruling Kim dynasty on the second anniversary of the death of former leader Kim Jong-Il, officials said Friday.

The warning was contained in a message sent Thursday by the secretariat of the National Defense Commission, the North's highest military body, through a military hotline, the South's defense ministry said.

An Ethiopian Airlines jet got stuck at a small airport in northern Tanzania, after it made an unscheduled landing there, an Agence France Presse journalist and aviation sources said Thursday.

Arusha airport is normally used only for smaller aircraft on domestic flights and light aircraft chartered for trips to game parks.

A 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit south Pakistan early on Friday, seismologists said.

The quake struck at 00:28 am local time (19:28 GMT) at the relatively shallow depth of five kilometers (three miles), 32 kilometers west of Warah in Sindh province, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.