Morocco voiced its "satisfaction" on Thursday at the U.N. Security Council resolution renewing the mandate of the Western Sahara peacekeeping force, which dropped U.S. plans to task it with rights monitoring.

U.N. Resolution 2099, which extends the U.N. mission's mandate for one year, instead urged Morocco and Polisario Front rebels "to continue in their respective efforts to enhance the promotion and protection of human rights in Western Sahara and the Tindouf refugee camps" in Algeria.

The United States has withdrawn a demand that the United Nations start human rights investigations in disputed Western Sahara following furious lobbying by Morocco, diplomats said Tuesday.

Morocco, which has occupied Western Sahara since the 1970s, had condemned a U.S. move to put the demand in a U.N. Security Council resolution on the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the North African territory to be voted on Thursday.

Moroccan police violently dispersed a protest by separatists in the Western Sahara, Algerian TV and rights activists reported on Monday, during a visit to the disputed territory by U.N. envoy Christopher Ross.

The independent Ennahar TV channel broadcast images of plainclothes Moroccan police beating Sahrawi men and women in Laayoune, chasing them through the streets and dragging some of them along the ground.

U.N. envoy on the Western Sahara conflict, Christopher Ross, is to start a new tour next week in a bid to revive talks between Morocco and the Polisario Front, a U.N. spokesman said Friday.

Ross will visit the disputed territory, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania during the tour from March 20 to April 3, said deputy U.N. spokesman Eduardo del Buey.

Four European Parliament members were denied entry into Morocco Wednesday by police who suspected them of supporting the independence claims of Western Sahara, their party grouping said.

The lawmakers "disembarked from a plane in Casablanca and were promptly met by local police who refused them entry to the country," said a statement released by European Parliament liberals after Agence France Presse inquiries with bosses at the Brussels legislature prompted by information from sources in Rabat.

A fisherman has died of swine flu in the Western Sahara region, where 11 others have been tested H1N1 positive, the Moroccan health ministry said on Sunday.

The victim, a 40-year-old, had been suffering from a "chronic disease" but the other 11 fishermen are not in serious condition, the ministry said in a statement.

Algeria proposed Saturday to boost cooperation with North African neighbors against terror and organized crime as the five-nation Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) held its first high-level conference since 1996.

Algeria sought "true and effective Maghreb cooperation in the fields of terrorism, organized crime, illegal arms and drug trafficking and clandestine immigration," Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci told counterparts in Rabat.

Western Saharan rebels have detained people implicated in the October kidnapping of three Europeans in Algeria, the APS agency quoted rebel officials as saying on Thursday.

"They were acting on behalf of a criminal organization unknown until now," Khatri Eddouh, president of the Polisario parliament, was quoted as telling journalists late Wednesday.