KHARTOUM/TUNIS (Reuters) – Fury about a film that insults the
Prophet Mohammad tore across the Middle East after weekly prayers on Friday with
protesters attacking U.S. embassies and burning American
flags as the Pentagon rushed to bolster security at its missions.
The obscure California-made film triggered an attack on the U.S. consulate in
Libya’s city of Benghazi that killed the U.S.
ambassador and three other Americans on Tuesday, the anniversary of the
September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
In Tunis, at least three people were killed and more than two dozen wounded,
state television said after police gunfire near the U.S. embassy in the city
that was the cradle of last year’s Arab Spring uprisings for democracy. At least
one person died in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, a doctor said, after some of
thousands of protesters had leaped into the U.S. embassy.
As U.S. military drones faced Islamist anti-aircraft fire over Benghazi,
about 50 marines landed in Yemen a day after the U.S. embassy there was stormed.
For a second day in the capital Sanaa, police battled hundreds of young men
around the mission.
In Khartoum, wider anger at Western attitudes to Islam also saw the German
embassy overrun, with police doing little to stop demonstrators who raised a
black Islamist flag. Violence at the U.S. embassy followed protests against both
Washington and the Sudanese government, which is broadly at odds with the
West.
The wave of indignation and rage over the film, which portrays Mohammad as a
womanizer and a fool, coincided with Pope Benedict’s arrival in Lebanon for a
three-day visit.
The protests present U.S. President
Barack Obama with a new foreign policy crisis less than two months before
seeking re-election and tests Washington’s relations with democratic governments
it helped to power across the Arab world.
He was at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington to greet a flight bringing
home remains of the four dead from Benghazi.
It also emerged that Libya had closed its airspace over the second city’s
airport for a time because of heavy anti-aircraft fire by Islamists aiming at
U.S. reconnaissance drones flying over the city; Obama vowed to bring the
ambassador’s killers to justice.
The closure of the airport prompted speculation that the United States was
deploying special forces in preparation for an attack against the militants who
were involved in the attack.
A Libyan official said the spy planes flew over the embassy compound and the
city, taking photos and inspecting locations of radical militant groups who are
believed to have planned and staged the attack on the U.S. consulate.
There were protests in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
MARINES TO YEMEN
The Pentagon said it had sent a “fast” platoon of Marines to Yemen to bolster
U.S. embassy security after clashes in Sanaa.
U.S. embassies were the main target of anger and protest but most embassy
staff were not at work because Friday is the Muslim weekend across the Arab
World.
The frenzy erupted after traditional Muslim Friday prayers. Fury over the
film has been stoked by Internet video footage, social networks, preachers and
word-of-mouth.
Protesters clashed with police near the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Two Islamist
preachers in Egypt told worshippers that those who made the movie deserved to
die under Islamic law but they urged protesters not to take their anger out on
diplomats.
In the restive Sinai peninsula, militants opened fire on an international
observer base near El Gorah, close to the borders of Israel and the Gaza Strip,
and burned tires blocking a road to the camp, a witness and a security source
reported. The source said two members of the force were wounded.
The Sudanese who broke into the German embassy in Khartoum and hoisted an
Islamic flag, while one person was killed in protests in the northern Lebanese
city of Tripoli.
Police in the Sudanese capital had fired tear gas to try to disperse 5,000
protesters who had ringed the German embassy and nearby British mission. A
Reuters witness said police stood by as a crowd forced its way into Germany’s
mission.
Demonstrators hoisted a black Islamic flag saying in white letters “there is
no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet”. They smashed windows, cameras and
furniture in the building and then started a fire.
Staff at Germany’s embassy were safe “for the moment”, Foreign Minister Guido
Westerwelle said in Berlin. He also told Khartoum’s envoy to Berlin that Sudan
must protect diplomatic missions on its soil.
Sudan’s Foreign Ministry had criticized Germany for allowing a protest last
month by right-wing activists carrying caricatures of the Prophet and for
Chancellor Angela Merkel giving an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist who
depicted the Prophet in 2005 triggering protests across the Islamic world.
BASHIR UNDER PRESSURE
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is under pressure from Islamists who feel the
government has given up the religious values of his 1989 Islamist coup.
The official body of Sudan’s Islamic scholars called for the faithful to
defend the Prophet peacefully, but at a meeting of Islamists, some leaders had
said they would march on the German and U.S. embassies and demanded the
ambassadors be expelled.
The Foreign Ministry said in its statement: “The German chancellor
unfortunately welcomed this offence to Islam in a clear violation of all
meanings of religious co-existence and tolerance between religions.”
Sudan used to host prominent militants in the 1990s, such as Osama bin Laden,
but the government has sought to distance itself from radicals to improve ties
with the West.
A Lebanese security source said a man was killed in Tripoli as protesters
tried to storm a government building.
Earlier, a U.S. fast food restaurant was set alight. Twelve members of the
security forces were wounded by stones thrown by protesters, the source
said.
Protesters also clashed with police in Yemen, where one person died and 15
were injured on Thursday when the U.S. embassy compound was stormed.
U.S. and other Western embassies in other Muslim countries had tightened
security, fearing anger at the film may prompt attacks on their compounds after
the weekly worship.
Obama has promised to bring those responsible for the Benghazi attack to
justice, and the United States also sent warships towards Libya which one
official said was to give flexibility for any future action.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington had nothing to do
with the crudely made film posted on the Internet, which she called “disgusting
and reprehensible”, and the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff called a
Christian pastor in Florida to ask him to withdraw his support for it.
Palestinians staged demonstrations in both the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
Israeli police, some on horseback, used stun grenades and made a number of
arrests outside Jerusalem’s Old City as a few dozen demonstrators tried to march
on the nearby U.S. consulate.
“Israeli police prevented an illegal demonstration from reaching the U.S.
consulate in East Jerusalem and used stun grenades after rocks and bottles were
thrown at them,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
In Nablus, in the northern West Bank, several hundred people protested and
burned an American flag,
witnesses said.
AMERICAN FLAGS BURNED
The largest protests were in the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Islamist
group Hamas, with at least 30,000 Palestinians staging rallies across the
coastal territory.
Some 25,000 took to the streets of Gaza City, answering a call by Hamas and
the smaller Islamic Jihad faction and waving the green and black flags of the
two factions.
American and Israeli flags were set alight, along with an effigy of the
film’s producer.
Protesters in Afghanistan set fire to an effigy of Obama and burned a U.S.
flag after Friday prayers in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Directing their anger against the U.S. pastor who supported the film, tribal
leaders also agreed to put a $100,000 bounty on his head.
About 10,000 people held a noisy protest in the Bangladeshi capital. They
burned U.S. flags, chanted anti-U.S. slogans and demanded punishment for the
offenders, but were stopped from marching to the U.S. embassy. There was no
violence.
Thousands of Iranians held nationwide protests. There were also rallies in
Malaysia, Nigeria, Jordan, Kenya, Bahrain, Qatar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Iraq.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Ghobari in Sanaa, Samia Nakhoul in Beirut,
Ulf Laessing and Khalid Abdelaziz in Khartoum, Gareth Jones in Berlin, Suleiman
Al-Khalidi in Benghazi, Marie-Louise Gumuchian in Libya, Sami Aboudi in Dubai,
Raissa Kasolowsky in Abu Dhabi, Aref Mohammed in Basra, Iraq, Siva Sithraputhran
in Kuala Lumpur, Anis Ahmed in Bangladesh, Regan Doherty in Doha, Roberto
Landucci in Italy and Mirwais Harooni in Kabul; Writing by Philippa Fletcher;
Editing by Peter Millership and Alastair Macdonald)
