Kuwait yesterday identified the suicide bomber behind its worst militant attack as a young Saudi Arabian man. It said it had detained the driver of the vehicle that took him to a Shi’ite Muslim mosque where he killed 27 people.

People being investigated in a counter-terrorism investigation in Italy may have been planning an attack against the Vatican, one of the prosecutors leading the probe said.

SAUDI ARABIA:

Pope Francis has called for an end to all forms of fundamentalism and said fighting hunger and poverty, rather than military intervention alone, were key to stopping Islamist militants carrying out "grave persecutions" in Syria and Iraq.

Street fighting raged between Kurdish defenders and Islamic State militants who advanced into Kobani yesterday after subjecting the Syrian border town to an assault lasting almost three weeks, a monitoring group said.

France’s president has said there is “no time to lose” in the global push to combat extremists from the Islamic State group, as reconnaissance planes from his country stand ready for action.

Newly outraged by the beheading of yet another Western hostage, diplomats from around the world are in Paris pressing for a coherent global strategy to combat extremists from the Islamic State group.

Egyptian authorities have raided homes of Muslim Brotherhood members in an apparent attempt to disrupt the group ahead of mass rallies by supporters of the country’s ousted president.

New details have emerged about how the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects may have been swayed by a radical, anti-American strain of Islam.

A Saudi man was killed and his wife and two children were injured when their car crashed off a bridge while being pursued by religious police in the conservative Islamic kingdom, a spokesman for the religious police said.

Pakistani security forces fought Taliban militants on the outskirts of the main city in the north-west’s Swat Valley and entered two other Taliban-held towns there, the army said today, foreshadowing what could become bloody urban battles.

Dozens of suspected al-Qaida militants stormed an Iraqi Shiite village north of Baghdad today, killing at least 13 people and torching homes, police said.

A convicted drug dealer who agreed to pose as a potential terrorist among a shadowy group accused of plotting to blow up John F Kennedy International Airport secretly fed information to US investigators in exchange for a lighter sentence.

A string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on yesterday, including 17 outside Baghdad’s most venerated Sunni mosque.

Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital.

A car bomb exploded in northern Iraq today, killing at least 22 people and wounding 26, police said.

Funeral processions began today for the people who were killed by car bombs and mortars in Baghdad’s largest Shiite district, the deadliest attack since the war began.

Funeral processions began today for the more than 160 people who were killed by car bombs and mortars in Baghdad’s largest Shiite district.

Four people were killed and 15 wounded when gunmen stormed a Sunni mosque near Tikrit today, Iraqi police said.

Philip Pullella, Vatican City

More than 300,000 Muslims began a two-day, 110-mile march to the holy city of Najaf today to mourn the Shiite leader assassinated in a car bombing that killed at least 85 people.