An Egyptian court is to deliver a verdict on April 21 in the trial of ousted president Mohamed Morsi and 14 others charged with inciting the killing of protesters, judicial officials said Thursday.

The ruling will be the first against Morsi, who is facing several trials along with top leaders of his Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement on charges that are punishable by death.

Egypt's president opened the new year with a dramatic call for a "revolution" in Islam to reform interpretations of the faith entrenched for hundreds of years, which he said have made the Muslim world a source of "destruction" and pitted it against the rest of the world.

The speech was Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi's boldest effort yet to position himself as a modernizer of Islam. His professed goal is to purge the religion of extremist ideas of intolerance and violence that fuel groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State — and that appear to have motivated Wednesday's attack in Paris on a French satirical newspaper that killed 12 people.

The Arab League and Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's most prestigious center of learning, both condemned a deadly attack Wednesday on a Paris satirical newspaper.

"Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi strongly condemns the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris," the League said after gunmen stormed the weekly's offices killing at least 12 people and chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest).

Authorities in Kuwait have detained a former liberal opposition lawmaker for allegedly insulting the Gulf state's ruler and criticizing a visit by the Egyptian president, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Prosecutors detained Saleh al-Mulla after questioning him on Tuesday night about comments made on Twitter, lawyer Abdullah al-Ahmad told Agence France Presse.

Ottawa's top diplomat said Tuesday he is close to reaching a deal with Egypt on deporting to Canada one of three imprisoned Al-Jazeera journalists.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said he was working to free Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy.

An Egyptian police officer was killed Tuesday while trying to defuse a bomb outside a petrol station in Cairo, police said, with jihadists claiming responsibility.

Three employees were also wounded when the device, hidden in a flower pot, exploded near a police station on al-Harram street, a busy avenue leading to the pyramids.

British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has disputed a story reporting how Egyptian officials warned her she risked arrest last year if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary.

In an article for the Huffington Post, Clooney said it was "experts in Egyptian affairs" who issued the warning over a February 2014 report for the International Bar Association, not the authorities, as was reported in The Guardian.

Thirteen Egyptian Christians held in Libya have been freed, a tribal leader said on Monday after government sources reported they had been abducted by Islamist militants.

However, Muftah Marzuq, head of the council of elders in the coastal city of Sirte, insisted that the 13 had not been kidnapped, but had been detained by people smugglers.

Czech archaeologists have unearthed the tomb of a previously unknown queen believed to have been the wife of Pharaoh Neferefre who ruled 4,500 years ago, officials in Egypt said Sunday.

The tomb was discovered in Abu Sir, an Old Kingdom necropolis southwest of Cairo where there are several pyramids dedicated to pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty, including Neferefre.

Arab League ambassadors will meet on Monday to discuss the deepening conflict in Libya, the bloc's deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli said.

The meeting at the Cairo-based League was requested by Libya's internationally recognized government, which is battling Islamist-backed militias, and supported by its two leading regional backers, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.