Clashes as Pakistani forces block cartoon rally

PAKISTANI security forces arrested hundreds of Islamic hard-liners and virtually sealed off the capital Islamabad yesterday before using gunfire and tear gas to disperse a protest that had been banned by the government after a wave of deadly riots.

Elsewhere in the Muslim world, demonstrators with wooden staves and stones tried unsuccessfully to storm the US embassy in Indonesia, while tens of thousands rallied in the Turkish city of Istanbul as the violence unleashed by cartoons of Mohammed continued.

Troops patrolled the deserted streets of the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri, where thousands of Muslims attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people during a protest against the cartoons. Most of the victims were beaten to death by rioters.

The cartoons published by a Danish newspaper in September and reprinted by other Western publications have caused outrage among Muslims, and mass protests have turned increasingly violent and claimed at least 45 lives worldwide: including 11 in Afghanistan, and 10 on Friday in the Libyan coastal city of Benghazi during riots outside the Italian consulate - apparently sparked by a right-wing Italian minister who wore a T-shirt with a prophet caricature.

Anxious to avoid a repeat of riots that killed five people in two Pakistani cities last week, thousands of police and paramilitary forces, some in armoured personnel carriers, others behind sandbag bunkers, were deployed in and around Islamabad to block a planned rally organised by a coalition of hard-line Islamic parties, Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) or United Action Forum. The MMA sympathises with the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan and is fiercely anti-US.

Authorities mounted roadblocks around the capital and declared they would arrest anyone joining a gathering of more than five people.

Opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rahman, who denounced the government ban as unconstitutional, was allowed to stage a small rally with eight other opposition lawmakers and a few supporters. They chanted “God is great!” and “Any friend of America is a traitor.”

But police fired tear gas and warning gunshots to quell hundreds of other protesters, who attempted to join them and then enter the diplomatic enclave where most foreign embassies are located.

The three-hour clash left the street littered with rocks and spent tear gas shells.