Qatar and Saudi Arabia are giving light arms to Syria's rebels but the fighters do not have the advanced weapons needed to confront Bashar al-Assad's regime, a spokeswoman for the opposition SNC said Monday.

"Rebels on the ground are searching desperately for arms wherever they can find them," a spokeswoman for the Syrian National Council, Bassma Kodmani, told France's Europe 1 radio.

Saudi King Abdullah invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an extraordinary summit of Muslim leaders to be held this month in the holy city of Mecca, state news agency SPA reported Sunday.

The Saudi monarch "sent a written letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inviting him to attend the extraordinary Islamic solidarity meeting which will be held in Mecca" in mid-August, SPA reported.

A Saudi policeman and an armed protester were killed in overnight clashes in the Eastern Province, the interior ministry announced on Saturday.

"A security patrol came under heavy gunfire from four armed rioters on motorbikes" in Qatif, ministry spokesman Mansur al-Turki was quoted by official news agency SPA as saying.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz on Monday described prominent Shiite cleric Nimr Nimr, detained in the kingdom's Eastern Province, as mentally ill.

"Nimr Nimr is someone who stirs sedition... The way he speaks reflects a mental deficiency and imbalance," Prince Ahmed said at a press conference, according to a report by state news agency SPA.

A Gulf rights group and a Kuwaiti MP on Sunday criticized the arrest of a member of the Gulf state's ruling family for expressing "political views" deemed offensive.

"Freedom for Sheikh Meshaal al-Malek al-Sabah who was arrested by the state security police," the Gulf Forum for Civil Societies, an organization of liberal activists, said on its Twitter account.

A five-day Saudi fundraising campaign to support the people in Syria has raised more than $72.33 million, the kingdom's Interior Minister Prince Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz was quoted as saying Saturday.

The campaign, launched on Monday, received donations worth 271.245 million riyals ($72.33 million), the state news agency SPA reported quoting Prince Ahmed.

A Saudi man who spent nearly seven years in an Israeli jail after he got lost in Egypt's Sinai desert has returned home, local daily al-Watan reported on Saturday.

Abdulrahman al-Atwi arrived in Riyadh on Thursday from the United States to where he was deported by Israel several months ago, the newspaper said, adding that it met him at his lawyer's residence in the Saudi capital.

Saudi security forces opened fire on Shiite protesters in the tense Qatif district of the Eastern Province Friday, wounding several as hundreds marched to demand the release of detainees, witnesses said.

Live rounds fired by anti-riot police wounded a number of protesters who took to the streets in the early hours, the witnesses said, without specifying a figure.

Saudi Arabia is proposing a U.N. General Assembly resolution which will highlight a Syrian government threat to use chemical weapons, its U.N .envoy said Wednesday.

The new Arab initiative follows the failure of a western-attempt to get the U.N. Security Council to threaten sanctions against Syria's President Bashar Assad over the 16-month-old conflict, diplomats said. Russia and China vetoed the council resolution last week.

Saudi authorities on Wednesday temporarily freed a protester on trial after having been detained last year when he arrived at the site of a planned anti-government demonstration, activists told Agence France Presse.

"Khaled al-Johani was released for 48 hours during which he will remain under surveillance," an activist said, adding that his trial would continue.