The U.N. Security Council will vote next Tuesday to renew the peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara, again without widening its mandate to monitoring human rights, diplomats said.

The resolution circulated by the United States aims to send "a clear unified signal," a Security Council diplomat said Wednesday, a year after a serious row between Morocco and the U.S..

Morocco's King Mohamed VI attended weekly Friday prayers during a rare visit to Western Sahara, official media reported, ahead of a U.N. vote on the disputed territory.

MAP news agency said the king attended the prayers alongside the visiting interior minister of the Ivory Coast, Hamed Bakayoko.

Morocco's King Mohamed VI made a rare visit Thursday to the Western Sahara, ahead of a U.N. Security Council vote on the disputed territory, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

The U.N. Security Council is due to vote on April 23 to renew the mandate of its peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara, which was annexed by Morocco in the 1970s.

Morocco Tuesday jailed a British man, previously convicted of child sex offenses, for 20 years for kidnapping and attempting to rape three young girls, a rights activist at the trial said.

Robert Bill, 59, a former teacher from North Wales, was found guilty by the court in Tetouan at a hearing attended by his victims, Mohammed Benaissa, who heads the Northern Observatory for Human Rights, told Agence France Presse.

Activists condemned Tuesday Morocco's "total silence" over warnings about the plight of sub-Saharan migrants, accusing security forces of "barbaric acts" that contradicted the country's new migration policy.

Last month, following a surge in attempted border crossings into Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's North African enclaves, Moroccan authorities relocated hundreds of illegal immigrants to the capital.

A group of around 800 Moroccans, mostly women, staged a march in the capital Rabat on Sunday demanding that a constitutional guarantee of gender equality be applied in the kingdom.

The march from the city center to parliament was led by the Civil Coalition for the Application of Article 19, which is reportedly made up of some 500 NGOs, and was joined by civil society organizations, lawmakers, rights groups and lawyers.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon has called for "sustained, independent and impartial" monitoring of human rights in Western Sahara, while welcoming Moroccan efforts to improve the situation in disputed territory under its control.

His call, in a report to the Security Council released late Thursday, is likely to stoke renewed debate about widening the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force in the territory when it comes up for renewal later this month.

The bomber who targeted a bus in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Burgas in 2012, killing five Israeli tourists, was of Algerian origin and trained in camps in southern Lebanon, the Bulgarian daily Presa said Monday.

"The assailant was born in Algeria, lived in Morocco and was trained in camps in South Lebanon. He also studied at a Beirut university with the other two suspects," the newspaper quoted sources familiar with the investigation as saying.

The controversial case of a Moroccan journalist accused of aiding "terrorism," whose popular news website has been blocked, is in the hands of the judiciary, the foreign minister said Friday.

Ali Anouzla was arrested last September after publishing an article on his website Lakome about -- and with links to -- an inflammatory video attributed to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb which called for jihad in Morocco.

Secretary of State John Kerry Friday pledged U.S. support for Moroccan reforms and efforts to promote regional stability, while highlighting social challenges faced by Rabat.

"Morocco is playing an important leadership role, and the United States will stand by this relationship every step of the way," he said at the end of a North African tour.