Three Sudanese opposition members were detained after police forcibly dispersed a rally demanding the release of other opponents of the regime held for several weeks, their leader said on Sunday.

"We dispersed but after I left the place... three young men were arrested," Farouk Abu Issa, head of the opposition alliance, told Agence France Presse.

A senior Egyptian Islamist on Saturday called on France to withdraw its forces from Mali, comparing its intervention in the African state with the United States campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

France's intervention in January to rout Islamist militants amounted to "colonialism," said Rashad al-Bayoumi, the deputy leader of Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood movement.

France on Thursday appointed a new ambassador to Mali, the foreign ministry said, amid a French-backed military intervention against Islamist rebels in the west African nation.

Gilles Huberson will replace Christian Rouyer, foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said, adding that it was in the framework of a routine reshuffle of French diplomatic posts in Africa.

A Malian soldier died in Timbuktu's first suicide bombing as the city came under assault Wednesday night, after French President Francois Hollande vowed a military operation to drive out radical Islamists from Mali was in its last phase.

The bomb went off as a group of armed men, trying to force their way into the ancient city, exchanged fire with French and Malian soldiers who chased out the Islamists in late January.

A Nigerian Islamist group warned against the use of force to free a French man and six members of his family kidnapped in Cameroon in a video aired on Thursday.

Tanguy Moulin-Fournier was kidnapped on February 19 along with his wife, four children aged between five and 12, and brother while vacationing in northern Cameroon.

French troops will begin pulling out of troubled Mali "from the end of April", French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told parliament on Wednesday.

Ayrault said a meeting next Monday between lawmakers in France's National Assembly and Senate would assess the involvement of French troops to help flush out Islamist rebels in the west African country "even if our troops will begin coming home from the end of April".

French police on Wednesday raided the Paris home of IMF chief Christine Lagarde in connection with a probe into her handling of a high-profile scandal when she was a government minister.

The investigation concerns Lagarde's 2007 decision to ask an arbitration panel to rule on a dispute between disgraced tycoon Bernard Tapie and the collapsed bank Credit Lyonnais.

A French hostage has been executed in Mali, a man claiming to be a spokesman for al-Qaida in North Africa told Mauritania's ANI news agency late Tuesday.

A French foreign office spokesman said Paris was trying to verify the report of the killing of Philippe Verdon, who was kidnapped in November 2011, adding that "we don't know at the moment" whether it was reliable.

A French Muslim woman who was sacked for wearing the Islamic headscarf at work was unfairly dismissed on the basis of her religion, France's top court ruled on Tuesday.

In a landmark decision, the Court of Cassation overturned an earlier ruling by an appeal court in Versailles which had upheld the right of her employer, a private creche in the Paris suburbs, to dismiss the woman after she refused to remove her headscarf.

Fifteen Islamist fighters have been killed in recent days in the northern Mali region of Gao, the French army said Tuesday, announcing the seizure of a large cache of arms and ammunition.

The claim came two weeks after France said more than 150 Islamist rebels had been killed since the middle of February in Mali. French losses in the intervention have been limited to five casualties.