Violent demonstrations in Pakistan left at least 17 people dead and hundreds injured on Friday as fresh protests erupted across the Muslim world against a US-made film and French cartoons mocking Islam.
In Middle Eastern and Asian countries, tens of thousands took to the streets after the main weekly prayers to vent their anger, with little sign that the angry protests would abate.
Western missions were shut across the Islamic world, fearing a further escalation of the backlash over the low-budget film, Innocence of Muslims, that has spread across the world.
France, where a magazine this week published a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed, has shut embassies, consulates, cultural centers and schools in 20 Muslim countries, fearing the fury will spread from US targets.
Pakistan bore the brunt of the anger on Friday, with huge crowds of demonstrators throwing stones and setting buildings ablaze to denounce the film.
Twelve people were killed in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and five in the northwestern city of Peshawar, hospital officials said. Demonstrators defied a government call for only peaceful rallies on what was declared a national holiday in honor of the Prophet.
The combined total of wounded in Karachi, Peshawar and in the capital, Islamabad, was 229.
Witnesses estimated that nationwide rallies mobilized more than 45,000 people, mainly members of right-wing religious parties and supporters of banned terror groups, although the numbers were still small in a country of 180 million.
Two cinemas were also torched and ransacked in the northwestern city of Peshawar, on the edge of tribal belt strongholds of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In Karachi, a policeman who died after being shot when officers used tear gas to disperse a crowd near the US consulate was among the 12 people killed.
The five dead in Peshawar include the driver for a TV channel, which blamed police for his death.
Police and paramilitary troops fired volleys of tear gas to hold off protesters from breaching barricades that sealed access to Western embassies and consulates.
Overall, 19 people have been killed in Pakistan during protests over the past week.
In Islamabad, gunshots were fired outside the five-star Serena Hotel and police baton-charged about 8,000 protesters trying to penetrate the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave.
The government had declared on Friday a “day of love for the prophet,” but for hours shut down mobile telephone networks in an apparent bid to prevent extremists from exploiting the protests to carry out bomb attacks.
“It is our collective responsibility to protest peacefully without causing harm or damage to life or property,” Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said as shops, markets and petrol stations shut en masse.
Washington has warned citizens not to travel to Pakistan and spent US$70,000 to air television ads in the country disassociating the US government from the film, made by extremist Christians in the US.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday reminded governments of their “solemn duty” to protect diplomatic missions.
In other Muslim countries, the protests were largely peaceful.
Sunnis and Shiites took to the streets of Lebanon, and there were also demonstrations in Basra in Iraq and in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
Tunisia banned all demonstrations amid fears of violence.
There were also demonstrations across Asia in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Bangladesh, where about 10,000 protestors took to the streets of Dhaka to condemn the film and the French cartoons.
Around a hundred Muslim protesters gathered outside the French embassy in London, while in German cities hundreds held peaceful protests against the film, which depicts Mohammed as a thuggish sexual deviant.
After French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo printed cartoons caricaturing Mohammed, the French government said it would deny requests to protest against the film.
The magazine’s editor, Stephane Charbonnier, mocked those angered by the cartoons as “ridiculous clowns” and accused the French government of pandering to them by criticizing the magazine for being provocative.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.