Gunmen travelling in a car opened fire on Tuesday on a group of Egyptian policemen outside Cairo's Al-Azhar university, killing three and wounding nine others, the interior ministry said.

The attack comes just days ahead of a presidential election on May 26-27, which former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is expected to win.

More than 13,000 soldiers from 24 countries are to take part in the annual "Eager Lion" military exercise in Jordan, state news agency Petra said Sunday.

It said "ground, air and naval forces comprising a total of more than 13,000 soldiers" are to be deployed during the May 25-June 10 war games, with "around 24 countries" taking part.

Jordan's ambassador to Libya was freed and flown home on Tuesday, a month after being kidnapped, in an exchange for a Libyan jihadist jailed in Jordan for plotting bomb attacks.

A Jordanian minister told AFP that ambassador Fawaz Aitan had been released, and that the jihadist would serve out the rest of his life prison sentence in his homeland under an extradition agreement ratified on Thursday.

Jordan, home to many Islamic and Christian holy sites, hopes a visit this month by Pope Francis will promote religious tourism and boost an industry hit hard by regional turmoil.

Tourism contributes 12 percent of gross domestic product in the desert kingdom and last year saw arrivals drop 10 percent to 5.4 million with revenues falling 6.25 percent to $3 billion (2.2 billion euros).

A man has died in Jordan after being infected with the MERS virus, the government said Monday, on the eve of a World Health Organisation emergency meeting on the disease.

The latest death brings to five the number of fatalities in Jordan from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus since it first emerged in 2012.

Two new infections from MERS coronavirus have been detected in Jordan, the health ministry said Thursday, one a Saudi man and the other a Jordanian medic who was treating him.

State news agency Petra which carried the report said this brought to seven the total number of people who were diagnosed in Jordan with the disease known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome since 2012.

Israel summoned Jordan's ambassador Thursday to protest an "anti-Israeli" article by a former Jordanian foreign minister, in which he based his argument on a Hitler quote, the foreign ministry said.

Spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel's embassy in Amman also sent the foreign ministry there an official protest over an article published on Monday by Kamel Abu Jaber in The Jordan Times.

A massive refugee camp opened Wednesday in the eastern desert of Jordan for Syrians fleeing the war in their country with the U.N. urging more aid in the long run.

The Azraq camp can accommodate up to 50,000 people but the U.N. agency for refugees UNHCR says it can be expanded to take in 130,000, making it one of the biggest in the world.

Rebels in southern Syria say they've united tens of thousands of fighters and rejected the extremism and infighting that have plagued the uprising elsewhere, but still want for external support.

The so-called Southern Front was created around two months ago and includes some 30,000 fighters from more than 55 mainstream rebel groups operating from the Jordanian border to the outskirts of Damascus and the Golan Heights, the rebels say.

The United Nations said on Monday that Jordan's third refugee camp, Azraq, had received its first group of Syrians ahead of its official opening this week.

"A few hundred Syrian refugees started to arrive in Azraq camp this morning," Ali Bibi, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR in Jordan, told AFP.