Tens of thousands of people shouting "God is Great!" marched through Karachi yesterday and burned effigies of the Danish prime minister in Pakistan's latest round of protests over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
About 5,000 police and paramilitary forces, wearing helmets and wielding guns and shields, were deployed along the 3km route of the rally to prevent the violence that has plagued other protests throughout the country this week, police said.
The rally in Karachi ended peacefully and about 40,000 people participated in it, said Shahnawaz Khan, a senior police officer.
PHOTO: AP
Protesters burned Danish flags and also chanted, "God's curse be on those who insulted the prophet." The government ordered educational institutions to close for the day, and many shops in the city were shut. Most public transportation did not operate.
Shah Turabul Haq, the head of Jamat Ahl-e-Sunnat, the Sunni Muslim group that organized the rally, said the "movement to protect the prophet's sanctity will continue until the pens of the blasphemous people are broken and their tongues get quiet."
He demanded the government expel ambassadors of countries where newspapers published cartoons of the prophet.
The drawings were first published in a Danish newspaper last September and later reprinted by other media, mainly in Europe.
Protests over the cartoons escalated in the southern Philippines yesterday when demonstrators "beheaded" effigies of two Danish journalists who caused the publication of the caricatures -- Flemming Rose, Jyllands Posten cultural editor, and Carsten Juste, the newspaper's editor in chief, after a local Muslim cleric read a fatwa, religious edict, against them.
The protesters, numbering more than 3,000, also burned a Danish flag during the rally in Marawi City, Lanao del Sur Province.
Muslim cleric Alem Mohammad Mansawi Mimbalawag said "reconciliation and public official apology" were no longer enough to assuage the injury brought by the cartoons to Muslims.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has asked Denmark to keep its troops in Iraq, despite demands for a withdrawal by the provincial council in Basra, where the 530-strong Danish contingent is based, the Danish foreign minister said.
"What we have learned is that the Iraqi government asks us to stay. They believe that Danish soldiers are doing a very brave job, and an honorable job that they ask us to continue," Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller told Danish broadcaster DR late on Wednesday.
In Malaysia, former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim yesterday criticized the government's decision to shut down two newspapers that published cartoons of Mohammed.
Anwar condemned the cartoons as deeply offensive to all Muslims and said they were the product of "prejudice and ignorance" but added that the violent international response to them was also wrong.
Anwar also said he disagreed with the government's decision to suspend a Chinese-language newspaper for two weeks for publishing a photograph of a person reading a newspaper carrying one of the caricatures.
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