PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Armed militants killed seven people early Tuesday while attacking and burning a power station that is the largest in Pakistan's the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police said.

Peshawar Police Chief Imtiaz Altaf said dozens of militants were involved in attacking the power station in the Sheikh Mohammadi area of Badhber, in northwest Pakistan.

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The largest power station in the Khyber Pakhtunkwha province lies largely in ruin after Tuesday's attack.

He said the militants attacked the station with rockets and mortars, cutting off electricity to half of Peshawar, the major city that serves as the provincial capital, and adjoining areas.

"The militants first killed a police constable and security guard of the Water and Power Department deployed on the main entrance of the power house," the police chief said.

They then entered the station and set numerous fires before kidnapping nine people – later killing five of them and throwing their bodies in fields, he said.

Four Water and Power Department workers were still missing and believed to be in custody of the militants, he added.

Among the seven dead, four were employees of the Water and Power Department while three others were policemen.

A spokesman of the Peshawar Electric Supply Co., Shaukat Afzal, said the militants had destroyed the entire station.

"This 500-kilovolt grid station was the biggest power grid station of the province and has completely been damaged. People may face some extra power load shedding in the coming days," Afzal said.

Militants have recently stepped up attacks on security forces and government installations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and adjoining tribal areas and have threatened to disrupt May 11 general elections in the country.

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Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

An anti-Morsi protester stands with the national flag after protesters burned Muslim Brotherhood buses during clashes near the Muslim Brotherhood's national headquarters in Cairo's Moqattam district on March 22, 2013.

Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

Muslim Brotherhood supporters conduct Friday noon prayers in front of the main headquarters of the Brotherhood in Cairo on March 22, 2013.

Amr Nabil / AP

Egyptians shout anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans during a march from downtown to the main Brotherhood headquarters in the hilltop neighborhood of Muqattam, Cairo, Egypt, on March 22, 2013. Thousands of protesters from different areas of Cairo are marching on Friday to express their rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi's rule.

Amr Nabil / AP

Egyptians shout anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans during a demonstration, in Talaat Harb Square in downtown Cairo, Egypt, on March 22, 2013.

By Reuters

CAIRO (Reuters) - Hundreds of Egyptian protesters and Muslim Brotherhood supporters clashed near the group's headquarters in Cairo on Friday, and at least 30 people were wounded, medics said.

Columns of riot police stood guard as chanting protesters holding flags and banners packed streets around the Brotherhood headquarters, footage on Al Jazeera and state TV showed.

Earlier in the day, Brotherhood supporters had arrived in the vicinity on buses and were showered with stones from the protesters, and Brotherhood supporters threw stones back, witnesses said. About 30 people were wounded in the fighting, Mohamed Sultan, the head of the ambulance service, said.

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Supporters of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood clash with anti-government protesters near the movements' headquarters in Cairo on March 22, 2013.

Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

Anti-Morsi protesters carry a Muslim Brotherhood member after hitting him during clashes near the Muslim Brotherhood's national headquarters in Cairo on March 22, 2013.

Amr Nabil / AP

Egyptian policemen write a report at a destroyed branch headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood after protesters broke in to the building in Cairo, Egypt, on March 22, 2013.

Khaled Elfiqi / EPA

An Egyptian anti-Muslim Brotherhood protester throws a stone towards Muslim Brotherhood supporters during clashes near the party's national headquarters in Cairo on March 22.

Khaled Elfiqi / EPA

An injured Egyptian anti-Muslim brotherhood protester is taken away by his comrades, during clashes near the Muslim Brotherhood's national headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, on March 22.

MEXICO CITY -- Two men armed with a machine gun and a handgun opened fire in a bar on the outskirts of the Mexican tourist resort of Cancun on Thursday, killing six people and wounding five, the office of the state's attorney general said.

Cancun, a major tourist destination on Mexico's Caribbean coast, has largely escaped the drug-related violence that has racked Acapulco, a faded tourist hot spot on the Pacific coast.

Last month, six Spanish women were raped by hooded gunmen who forced their way into the Acapulco beach house the women had rented.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has vowed to reduce the violence that soared after his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, launched an assault on drug cartels.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2007.

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Karim Kadim / AP

Black smoke from a car bomb rises in central Baghdad on Thursday.

BAGHDAD -- A string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by a coordinated assault by gunmen who raided a government building and battled security forces in the streets. The attack left at least 24 people dead and dozens wounded.

The fighting lasted about an hour, ending with security forces storming the building, killing the gunmen and evacuating hundreds of people who had hunkered down in their offices, according to police.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the attack bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda's Iraqi arm. The group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq, frequently uses car bombs and coordinated blasts in an effort to undermine Iraqis' confidence in the Shiite-led government.

The attack erupted shortly after midday in Baghdad's Allawi area, a largely commercial district that is home to the Iraqi National Museum and the city's main bus station.

At least two blasts, including one car bomb and another believed to be from a suicide bomber, went off near a building currently housing the Justice Ministry. A police officer who was among the troops sent to clear the area said that approximately six gunmen wearing police uniforms quickly stormed the building.

"Everybody panicked (after the first blast) and seconds later we heard a second explosion. I looked through the window and I saw some gunmen wearing police uniforms entering the building. We knew that these policemen were fake," said Asmaa Abbas, a Justice Ministry employee who was working in her third-floor office.

A gunbattle quickly broke out between the intruders and security forces, as other explosions went off near the bus station and the headquarters for a VIP protection force that provides bodyguards for lawmakers, government ministers and other senior officials.

'The longest hour of my life'
After about an hour, security forces stormed the building and some of the gunmen detonated explosives they were wearing, the officer on the scene said.

"It was the longest hour in my life," said Abbas, the employee.

Saad Shalash / Reuters

An Iraqi Red Crescent ambulance transports people injured in one of Thursday's attacks in central Baghdad.

Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim said there were more than 1,000 people in the four-story building at the time of the attack. He said the minister was abroad and was not inside.

"When the explosions and shooting started, the guards evacuated me out a back door, and I have no idea what happened after that," he said, speaking over the telephone from outside the building.

The attack killed 24 people in addition to the gunmen and wounded 57 others, police said. The dead include seven police officers.

Hospital officials confirmed the casualty numbers. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Violence in Iraq has subsided from its peak in 2006 and 2007, but deadly attacks remain frequent almost a decade after the U.S.-led invasion.

Related:

Full Iraq coverage from NBC News

A Belgian citizen shot to death in the Pacific resort of Acapulco near the site of the Mexican Open tennis tournament was a businessman, local prosecutors in Mexico said Sunday.

Saturday's killing was the second violent attack involving foreigners in Acapulco in less than three weeks. On Feb. 4, a band of masked gunmen invaded a beachfront home and raped six visiting Spanish women.

The Guerrero state district attorney's office identified the dead man as 59-year-old Jan Sarens, an executive with the family-owned Belgian firm Sarens, which supplies heavy transportation equipment for construction, mining and energy. It has offices in 50 countries, including Mexico.

Celia Gomez, an attorney for the firm's Mexico office, said it had not identified the body. Gomez said the company had a board member named Jans Sarens who lived in Mexico.

The man was shot to death Saturday afternoon in a shopping center parking lot, and his body was found outside a Mercedes Benz car with Mexico City plates.

Authorities in Guerrero state said in a statement that the killing was being investigated and the motive for the attack had still not been determined.

Violence and crime, much of it blamed on drug gangs, have grown worse in Acapulco in recent years.

The Associated Press

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Yuri Cortez / AFP - Getty Images file

Relatives and human rights activists show a banner with pictures of missing people while marching during a protest marking the "International Week of the Detained-Disappeared" in May in Mexico City.

IGUALA, Mexico - Dozens of people were abducted and murdered by Mexican security forces over the past six years during a gruesome war with drug cartels, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, urging President Enrique Pena Nieto to overhaul the military justice system. 

The rights group said that since 2007 it has documented 149 cases of people who were never seen again after falling into the hands of security forces, and that the government failed to properly investigate the "disappearances." 

"The result was the most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades," the U.S.-based group said. (Link: Human Rights Watch's full report).

The report was a grim reminder of the dark side of the war on drug cartels that killed an estimated 70,000 people during former President Felipe Calderon's six-year presidency. 

Human Rights Watch recommended reforming Mexico's military justice system and creating a national database to link the missing with the thousands of unidentified bodies that piled up during the military-led crackdown on drug cartels. 

The report also illustrates the obstacles that President Pena Nieto, who took office in December, faces in trying to stem the violence, restore order over areas of the country controlled by the drug cartels and end abuses by security forces. 

For nearly three years, 56-year-old shopkeeper Maria Orozco has sought to discover the fate of her son. She says he was abducted along with five colleagues by soldiers from the nightclub where they worked in Iguala, a parched town south of the Mexican capital. 

She says a grainy security video, submitted anonymously, shows the moment in 2010 when local soldiers rounded up the men. 

"We used to see the military like Superman or Batman or Robin. Super heroes," said Orozco. "Now the spirit of the whole country has turned against them." 

Hers was one of the cases illustrated in the Human Rights Watch report. 

27,000 disappeared?
Pena Nieto has vowed to take a different tack to his predecessor Calderon and focus on reducing violent crime and extortion rather than on going head to head with drug cartels. 

The government last month introduced a long-delayed law to trace victims of the drug war and compensate the families. It says it is moving ahead with plans to roll out a genetic database to track victims and help families locate the disappeared. 

"There exists, in theory, a database with more than 27,000 people on it," said Lia Limon, deputy secretary of human rights at Mexico's interior ministry. "It's a job that's beginning." 

Daniel Becerril / Reuters

Mexican soldiers take part in an operation to locate members of the music group Kombo Kolombia near Mina township in the state of Nuevo Leon on Jan. 27. Sixteen members of the band and other staff members was reported missing by their relatives, according to local media.

Still, impunity remains rife. The armed forces opened nearly 5,000 investigations into criminal wrongdoing between 2007 and 2012, but only 38 ended in sentencing, according to Human Rights Watch. 

In its report it describes the impact of the disappearances on victims' families, a daily reality for Ixchel Mireles, a 50-year-old librarian from the northern city of Torreon, whose husband Hector Tapia was abducted by men in federal police uniforms. 

Neither Mireles nor her daughter has heard from Tapia since that night in June 2010. 

"I want him to be alive, but the reality just destroys me," said Mireles. "I just want them to give him back, even if he is dead." 

'Bulletproof'
Since her husband's disappearance, Mireles has struggled financially, having lost his 40,000 pesos ($3,143) a month salary. She has moved her daughter to a cheaper university and can barely keep up payments on her house. 

"I now travel by foot," she said, noting that Mexico's social security system does not recognize the disappeared. 

Some family members of the disappeared have asked for soldiers guilty of rights abuses to be judged like civilians, a move Mexico's Supreme Court has approved. 

"To us it just seems that the military is untouchable," said Laura Orozco, 36, who says she witnessed her brother's military-led abduction. "They're bulletproof."

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From May 2012: Mexico's drug war -- No sign of 'light at the end of the tunnel'

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Syrians inspect destruction following an apparent surface-to-surface missile strike on the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Feb. 19. The attack killed at least 20 people and another 25 were missing, opposition activists said on Tuesday. The missile was identified from its remains as a Scud-type rocket that government forces have increasingly used in areas under opposition control in the province of Aleppo and in the province of Deir a-Zor to the east, they said.

Hamid Khatib / Reuters

A member of the Free Syrian Army along with civilians search for survivors after a Syrian army rocket attack on the rebel-held Jabal Badro district in the city of Aleppo, on Feb. 19.

Slideshow: Syria uprising

A look back at the conflict that has overtaken the country.

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Reuters -- A Syrian army rocket attack on a rebel-held district in the city of Aleppo killed at least 20 people and another 25 were missing, opposition activists said on Tuesday.

The missile was identified from its remains as a Scud-type rocket that government forces have increasingly used in areas under opposition control in the province of Aleppo and in the province of Deir a-Zor to the east, they said.

"The rocket brought down three adjacent buildings in Jabal Badro district. The bodies are being dug up gradually. Some, including children, have died in hospitals," Mohammad Nour said by phone from Aleppo. He said testimony from survivors indicated that 25 people were still under the rubble.

Continue reading.

Hamid Khatib / Reuters

A member of the Free Syrian Army sits near where a Syrian army rocket attack took place at the rebel-held Jabal Badro district in the city of Aleppo, on Feb. 19.

TUNIS, Tunisia -- Police and mourners clashed at the mass funeral on Friday of secular opposition leader Chokri Belaid, whose assassination has plunged Tunisia deeper into political crisis.

Braving chilly rain, at least 50,000 people turned out to honor Belaid in his home district of Jebel al-Jaloud in the capital, chanting anti-Islamist and anti-government slogans.

It was Tunisia's biggest funeral since the death of Habib Bourguiba, independence leader and first president, in 2000.

Violence erupted near the cemetery as police fired teargas at demonstrators who threw stones and set cars ablaze. Police also used teargas against protesters near the Interior Ministry, a frequent flashpoint for clashes in the Tunisian capital.

Tunisia, cradle of the Arab Spring uprisings, is riven by tensions between dominant Islamists and their secular opponents, and by frustration at the lack of social and economic progress since President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in January 2011.

Belaid's assassination has shocked a country that had hitherto experienced a relatively peaceful political transition.

"The people want a new revolution," shouted mourners in Tunis, who also sang the national anthem.

Crowds surged around an open army truck carrying Belaid's coffin, draped in a red and white Tunisian flag, as it traveled to the leafy Jallaz cemetery, as a security forces helicopter flew overhead.

EPA

Tunisian protesters run from teargas fired by police during protests Friday against the killing of opposition politician Chokri Belaid. Belaid's funeral drew tens of thousands of mourners and Tunis seethed with anger.

"Belaid, rest in peace, we will continue the struggle," mourners chanted, holding portraits of the politician killed near his home on Wednesday by a gunman who fled on a motorcycle.

Some demonstrators denounced Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the ruling Islamist Ennahda party. "Ghannouchi, assassin, criminal," they chanted. "Tunisia is free, terrorism out."

Police fired teargas to disperse anti-government protesters throwing stones and gasoline bombs in the southern mining town of Gafsa, a stronghold of support for Belaid, witnesses said.

Crowds there had chanted "The people want the fall of the regime," a slogan first used against Ben Ali.

Cradle of revolt
In Sidi Bouzid, the southern town where the revolt against the ousted strongman began, about 10,000 marched to mourn Belaid and shout slogans against Ennahda and the government.

Banks, factories and some shops were closed in Tunis and other cities in response to a strike called by unions in protest at Belaid's killing, but buses were running normally.

Tunis Air suspended all its flights because of the strikes, a spokesman for the national airline said. Airport sources in Cairo said EgyptAir had canceled two flights to Tunisia after staff at Tunis airport joined the general strike.

Anis Mili / Reuters

Soldiers help mourners carry the coffin of slain opposition leader Chokri Belaid during his funeral procession Friday in Tunis, Tunisia.

After Belaid's assassination, Prime Minister Hamdi Jebali, an Islamist, said he would dissolve the government and form a cabinet of technocrats to rule until elections could be held.

But his own Ennahda party and its secular coalition partners complained they had not been consulted, casting doubt over the status of the government and compounding political uncertainty.

No one has claimed responsibility for the killing of Belaid, a lawyer and secular opposition figure.

His family have blamed Ennahda but the party has denied any hand in the shooting. Crowds have attacked several Ennahda party offices in Tunis and other cities in the past two days.

"Hope still exists in Tunisia," Fatma Saidan, a noted Tunisian actor, told Reuters at Belaid's funeral. "We will continue to struggle against extremism and political violence."

While Belaid had only a modest political following, his criticism of Ennahda policies spoke for many Tunisians who fear religious radicals are bent on snuffing out freedoms won in the first of the revolts that rippled through the Arab world.

Secular groups have accused the Islamist-led government of a lax response to attacks by ultra-orthodox Salafi Islamists on cinemas, theaters and bars in recent months.

Related:

PhotoBlog: Mourning amid the teargas in Tunisia

Pedro Pardo / AFP - Getty Images

A hooded armed man stands guard in downtown Tecoanapa, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, on Jan. 24.

Pedro Pardo / AFP - Getty Images

Hooded men stand guard outside the Justice palace, in Ayutla de los Libres, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, on Jan. 24.

Pedro Pardo / AFP - Getty Images

Armed men guard the Justice palace from a car, in Ayutla de los Libres, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, on Jan. 24.

Pedro Pardo / AFP - Getty Images

A female guard watches over 27 people arrested by a residents' police force in Ayutla de los Libres in the Guerrero state of Mexico on Jan. 25.

Hundreds of men and women in the southern Mexico state of Guerrero have armed themselves with rifles, pistols and machetes to defend their villages against drug gangs that local police are unable or unwilling, to stop.

"There isn't one of us who hasn't felt the pain ... of seeing them take a family member and not being able to ever get them back," said the young civilian self-defense patrol member, who identified himself as "just another representative of the people of the mountain." Continue reading Associated Press article.

Guerrero, home to the Pacific resort town of Acapulco, has been one of Mexico's hardest hit states by drug violence, which has left more than 70,000 people killed across the country since 2006.

--Getty Images, Associated Press

Pedro Pardo / AFP - Getty Images

Some of the 27 people arrested by residents of Ayutla de los Libres, who have formed their own vigilante police force, are kept under custody inside a house in Ayutla de los Libres, on Jan. 25.