The European Union and United Nations called Friday for an urgent probe into a mass grave discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa, which local authorities say contained hundreds of dead babies and foetuses.

At least 421 bodies were buried in the grave in Maluku district in March, including about 300 stillborn babies and foetuses "abandoned in rivers, streams and even hospitals," the government said. 

Bitter exchanges between Macedonia's government and the opposition, including wiretapping and claims of million-euro bribes, have pushed the Balkan state into a deep crisis that could further hamper its already stalled bid for EU membership.

Since the beginning of the year, conservative Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's government and the centre-left opposition have communicated only through public exchanges of accusations.

Syria's President Bashar Assad on Wednesday received a delegation of Belgian lawmakers led by far-right Flemish nationalist Filip Dewinter, state media reported.

State news agency SANA said Assad met the delegation to discuss the conflict in Syria, in which more than 215,000 people have been killed since March 2011.

Belgian authorities said Saturday they plan to separate prisoners deemed at risk of converting others to Islamist extremism as fears mount that prisons are jihadist breeding grounds.

Justice Minister Koen Geens told Belgian media that such prisoners will be locked up by the end of the year in special prison sections created in the cities of Ittre and Bruges.

A Belgian minister drew criticism Friday for asking officials to survey how many people might be turning into Islamist extremists by looking at factors including whether they have grown beards.

Rachid Madrane told Agence France-Presse he had emailed some 700 officials in the French-speaking part of Belgium who deal with parole or community service issues to give an inventory of all changes in attitudes in people they handle.

A young Belgian woman was detained at the country's Charleroi airport on Sunday after being intercepted by Turkish authorities as she sought to return from Syria with her four-year-old son, officials said.

The woman, who left Belgium with her child and partner last year to go to Syria, was taken in for questioning upon her return, federal prosecutors said, adding that the police wanted to talk to her about her eight-month stay in the war-ravaged country.

Police in Mali Sunday hunted for the killers of two Europeans and three Malians in a jihadist attack on a nightclub, as a deadly assault on a U.N. barracks in the north heightened security concerns.

Officers in bulletproof vests patrolled the streets of the capital Bamako, where a masked gunman had burst into La Terrase, a popular venue among expats, spraying automatic gunfire and throwing grenades early Saturday.

Belgium is to send around 35 soldiers to Iraq to help train the Iraqi army in the fight against the Islamic State jihadist group, the government said Friday.

They will leave on Saturday and be based there for six months in a "secure location", it said in a statement, without giving further details.

Something happened in prison to Omar El-Hussein, the 22-year-old identified by police as the gunman who killed two people in a weekend shooting spree in Copenhagen.

His transformation from small-time criminal to cold-blooded killer is fuelling a debate about whether a radicalised environment in Danish prisons is pushing smalltime gangsters into the arms of Islamic extremism.

A Belgian court sentenced the leader of an Islamist group that sent jihadist fighters to Syria to a 12-year jail term on Wednesday and imprisoned several other members in one of the largest cases of its kind in Europe.

Fouad Belkacem, 32, the chief of the Sharia4Belgium group, was convicted by a court in the northern port city of Antwerp of radicalizing, recruiting and dispatching young men to fight holy war.