Pakistanis Protest For Fourth Day
Thousands of people shouting "God is Great!" marched through Karachi on Thursday and burned effigies of the Danish prime minister in Pakistan's fourth day of protests over cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, police said.
About 5,000 police and paramilitary forces, wearing helmets and wielding guns and shields, were deployed along the two-mile route of the rally to prevent the violence that has plagued other protests throughout the country this week, said Mushtaq Shah, chief of police operations in the southern city of Karachi.
There were no immediate reports of violence at Thursday's demonstration, organized by Jamat Ahl-e-Sunnat, a small Sunni Muslim group.
Shah estimated that 10,000 people took part in the rally, burning Danish flags and chanting "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, a hotbed of Islamic militancy, were shut. Most public transport was off the roads.
A spokesman for the organizers says the protests will continue, in his words, "until the pens of the blasphemous people are broken and their tongues get quiet."
In other developments:
Sandarovich said he came up with the idea after an Iranian newspaper launched a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust in response to the Prophet Muhammad drawings. "I think that a strong nation needs to know how to laugh at itself, and the Jewish nation has a long history of laughing at itself," Sandarovich said.
Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday appealed for European and other Western nations to condemn the cartoons, saying freedom of the press did not mean the right to insult the religious beliefs of others.
The drawings were first published in a Danish newspaper in September and later reprinted by other media, mainly in Europe. Many Muslims regard any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous. One of the drawings depicted the prophet with a turban shaped like a bomb.
Demonstrations have erupted around Asia, Europe and the Middle East over the cartoons of the prophet, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and have been reprinted by some other Western newspapers. In Afghanistan, 11 people died in riots last week; five people have died in Pakistan in the last two days.
On Wednesday, a protest by more than 70,000 Pakistanis in the northwestern city of Peshawar dissolved into deadly riots by stone-throwing and gun-wielding youths, who targeted foreign businesses.
The unrest followed similar riots Tuesday in Lahore, where U.S. and other Western business properties were vandalized and the provincial lawmakers' assembly set on fire.
Five people have been killed in protests in Pakistan this week.
Ameer ul-Azeem, a spokesman for United Action Forum, an opposition coalition of religious parties that have organized most of the protests in Pakistan, said television footage of violent attacks by protesters on embassies in other countries had prompted Pakistanis to do the same.
He appealed for people to avoid violence in more demonstrations the coalition plans for later this month, but didn't expect people to follow his advice. "At least, there will be one violent protest in every village, town and city," he said.