Moammar Gadhafi’s regime funded French President Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign, lawyers for former Libyan prime minister Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi said Thursday, quoting their client.

"Moammar Gadhafi, his regime and the officials who worked with him financed Sarkozy's election campaign in 2007," lawyer Bechir Essed told reporters in Tunis, where Mahmoudi is detained, mentioning the sum of some 50 million euros ($65 million).

French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched fierce assaults on Socialist rival Francois Hollande in their debate four days before their election clash, but failed to land a decisive blow on the frontrunner.

The pair swapped insults in Wednesday's tense exchange without either dominating, but Socialist challenger Hollande had gone into the televised clash as the pollsters' favorite and appeared to emerge from it unscathed.

France concluded on Wednesday two weeks of war games with the United Arab Emirates, which officials from both sides insisted were not related to regional tensions involving Iran.

The exercises, held every four years, came after a simmering row over ownership of three Gulf islands contested by the Emirates and Iran, and the United States' deployment of cutting-edge F-22 fighter jets to the UAE.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen told supporters Tuesday that she would back neither incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy nor Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande in Sunday's French presidential run-off.

"I will give neither my confidence, nor a mandate to these two candidates," Le Pen told a crowd in Paris. Although she said it was up to her supporters to make their own choice, she strongly suggested they cast blank ballots.

A French television journalist went missing in Colombia on Saturday following a leftist rebel attack on an army column that claimed four lives in the country's south, military officials said.

The reporter, identified as Romeo Langlois who works for France 24, was accompanying a military and police patrol in Caqueta province, where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are active, the officials said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday rejected Dominique Strauss-Kahn's claims that he was the cause of the ex-IMF chief's downfall that thwarted his bid for the French presidency.

"Enough is enough! I would tell Mr. Strauss-Kahn to explain himself to the law and spare the French his remarks," he said while on the election campaign trail in central France.

France warned Wednesday that it may push for a resolution allowing the use of force in Syria and said it wanted U.N. monitors to deploy within a fortnight as the peace plan was "strongly compromised".

"Things are not going well, the (Kofi) Annan plan is strongly compromised but there is still a chance for this mediation, on the condition of the rapid deployment of the 300 monitors," Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday he would not do a deal with the far-right, but insisted those who vote for Marine Le Pen's National Front should not be demonized.

Both Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger Francois Hollande finished ahead of Le Pen in Sunday's first round vote in France's presidential race, but the far-right flag-bearer won almost 18 percent of the vote.

Three French embassy staff in the Indonesian capital were kept in isolation overnight after coming into contact with a suspicious package, embassy officials said Tuesday.

Intelligence chief Lieutenant General Marciano Norman later said no harmful material was found in the envelope, which had been labeled "#ANTRAC" and was suspected of possibly containing anthrax.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist rival Francois Hollande stepped up their battle Tuesday for the six million votes that went to the far right in the first round of France's presidential election.

"It's up to me to convince the National Front (FN) voters," Hollande told Liberation newspaper, arguing that many of them were in fact left-wing and their support for the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party was a protest vote.