Moscow  - Passersby on their lunch break in downtown Moscow on Monday were witness to a brazen double murder by a hired hit man, but the news was dulled by the fact that it seemed all too familiar.

Prominent human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov left a press conference that day in the company of young journalist Anastasia Baburova at about 3 pm (1200 GMT), before joining the bustle headed to the Kropotinskaya metro station.

Budapest  - Ukraine restarted the delivery of gas to Hungary early Tuesday afternoon, the Hungarian gas distributor FGSZ said in a statement.

"This crisis has demonstrated that, although Ukraine remains the main transit country, there is also a need for alternative supply routes such as North and South Stream and Nabucco," Foreign Minister Kinga Goncz told the press.

Tunis  - Tunisian authorities on Monday said they were searching for survivors or bodies of would-be immigrants whose boat has reportedly sank off Tunisian shores, a security source told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Five would-be immigrants survived the sinking by swimming to the al-Marsa shore, 20 kilometres north of the capital Tunis.

Authorities are using military helicopters and a number of divers to conduct the search. The search team has not yet found any survivors or bodies, the source said.

Berlin  - Germany is at the ready to send four border police experts to Egypt with equipment to detect secret tunnels under the border to the Gaza Strip, a senior official said in Berlin on Monday.

Israel's invasion of Gaza was aimed at stopping a bombardment by rockets which are mainly smuggled into Gaza via the tunnels.

August Hanning, a state secretary at the Interior Ministry, said Egypt had asked for the detection equipment and technical skills.

Kampala  - Ugandan rebel group the Lord's Resistance Army killed hundreds of civilians in attacks - including the burning of a church - in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the weekend, a Ugandan government newspaper reported Monday.

The New Vision newspaper said the LRA, which has been fighting a guerrilla war for over two decades, attacked the villages of Tola and Libombi in north-east DR Congo, indiscriminately burning and hacking people to death.

Johannesburg  - The death toll in a regional cholera outbreak that has claimed over 2,200 lives in Zimbabwe has risen sharply in South Africa, where 19 people were reported dead in the north-east Monday.

The provincial health minister in Mpumalanga province, which is home to the famous Kruger National Park and borders Zimbabwe and Mozambique, told a press conference: "We now have 19 deaths recorded as cholera cases."