The French foreign ministry said Friday Paris did not have enough information that allows it to link between the attack on its troops in southern Lebanon and the active role France is playing concerning the situations in Syria.

“We have not yet linked” between the attack and the Syrian crisis, foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe condemned Friday's bomb attack on a U.N. peacekeeping patrol in Lebanon in which five French troops were wounded, saying France would not be intimidated by such "vile acts.”

"I condemn in the strongest terms the cowardly attack that was carried out against UNIFIL this morning," Juppe added in a statement.

March 14 opposition MP Marwan Hamadeh blamed Damascus for Friday's attack on a UNIFIL patrol in the southern city of Tyre, saying it was orchestrated with the help of its ally Hizbullah.

"It is clear that Syria was behind what happened today and the messenger was Hizbullah," Hamadeh told Agence France Presse. "Nothing happens in that region without Hizbullah's approval."

The leaders of 23 European countries moved to tie their economies much closer together in a new treaty in their latest attempt to shore up the euro, but failed to get the four other European Union members, including Britain, to join in.

Following marathon all-night talks, the 23 decided to back a new treaty with strict oversight over national budgets, as they try to convince markets that the euro has a future in the wake of a crippling debt crisis.

French ambassador Denis Pietton stressed that his country didn’t reject leading the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which undergoes a rotation principle between the three European countries that have the wider participation in it.

“We are satisfied with the amount of our participation in the UNIFIL, but we didn’t reveal any desire to command” the peacekeeping forces, Pietton said in an interview with As Safir newspaper published on Friday.

Embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “will not escape justice,” the French foreign ministry stressed Thursday.

“France does not give any credibility to Bashar al-Assad’s provocative statements, which totally contradict with the fact that acts of repression and violence against the Syrian people have continued unabated,” ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters, referring to Assad’s recent interview with ABC News.

Ivory Coast ex-president Laurent Gbagbo made his first appearance Monday before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, and accused France of orchestrating his arrest.

Gbagbo, the first former head of state to be brought before the tribunal, faces four counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape and inhuman acts, over post-election violence the U.N. said cost about 3,000 lives.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton revealed on Monday that Prime Minister Najib Miqati had received an official invitation from his French counterpart, Francois Fillon, to visit France.

He said after meeting the premier that President Nicolas Sarkozy would be happy to meet Miqati to congratulate him on the decision to fund the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

France is to pull out part of its diplomatic staff from Tehran following the ransacking of Britain's embassy this week by a pro-regime mob, adding to the international backlash against an increasingly defensive Iran.

The decision -- a temporary precaution, French diplomats said Saturday -- underlined the seriousness of the crisis developing between Iran and the West amid the ratcheting up of sanctions over Tehran's controversial nuclear efforts.

France has renounced leading the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon fearing that its contingent would be a possible target of attacks if the situation on the border deteriorated, according to a report published in Le Figaro Newspaper on Saturday.

“It is better to stay in the shadows when the French diplomacy is taking a major role in the campaign on the Syrian regime,” military sources told the newspaper.