Cartoon Protests Flare In Iran

Demonstrators Hurl Fire Bombs At Danish Embassy In Tehran

(CBS/AP) 
The Danish Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of any staff inside the building, which closed for the day before the demonstration.

Ambassador Claus Juul Nielsen told DR public television in Denmark that the protesters vandalized the ground floor of the embassy, which included the trade and the visa departments.

The crowd, which included about 100 women, ignored police orders to disperse and kept hurling fire bombs until being hit by tear gas. The crowd dispersed by midnight.

Hala Mustafa, the editor of an Egyptian political magazine, told Hawkins the protests are about more than insulting cartons.

"It's touched the nerve of the masses," Mustafa said. "It reflects the gap between the Arab, Muslim societies and the western world in general."

Also Monday, 200 members of Iran's parliament issued a statement warning that those who published the cartoons should remember the case of Salman Rushdie — the British author against whom the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a death warrant for his novel "The Satanic Verses."

The angry demonstrations in Iran recall the Nov. 4, 1979, seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran after the Islamic revolution that overthrew U.S. ally Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The students who held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days faced little or no police resistance in the post-revolutionary turmoil that had brought Shiite theologian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an Islamic government to power.

There has been a wave of protests across the Islamic world over caricatures first published in September by a Danish paper. They have since been reprinted by other media, mostly in Europe.

The drawings — including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb — have touched a raw nerve in part because Islamic law forbids any illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.

In a meeting with local authors, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned the cartoons and addressed the West: "Insulting the Prophet Muhammad would not promote your position," the official Iranian news agency quoted him as saying.

The Bush administration urged Saudi Arabia to help stem protests. "Certainly the leaders of the Saudi government might be individuals who might fulfill that role," spokesman Sean McCormack said. "There are others in the region who also might fulfill that role as well."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan issued a broad appeal to "all governments to take steps to lower tensions and prevent violence."

The worst of the violence in Afghanistan was outside Bagram, the main U.S. base, with Afghan police firing on some 2,000 protesters as they tried to break into the heavily guarded facility, said Kabir Ahmed, the local government chief.

Two demonstrators were killed and 13 people, including eight police, were wounded, he said. No U.S. troops were involved, the military said.

Afghan police also fired on protesters in the central city of Mihtarlam after a man in the crowd shot at them and others threw stones and knives, Interior Ministry spokesman Dad Mohammed Rasa said. Two protesters were killed and three people were wounded, including two police, officials said.