Three die as cartoon riots gather force

GUNFIRE and rioting erupted yesterday as more than 70,000 people joined Pakistan’s biggest protest yet against Mohammed cartoons, burning cinemas, a KFC restaurant and a South Korean-run bus station.

Three people died and dozens were injured in two cities, police and witnesses said.

The massive crowd went on a rampage in the northwestern city of Peshawar, torching businesses and fighting police, who struck back with tear gas and batons. It was the third straight day of violent demonstrations in the Islamic nation.

The rioters ransacked the offices of the Norwegian mobile phone company, Telenor, three cinemas and offices of Mobilink - the main mobile phone operator in the country, witnesses said. They also burned a bus terminal operated by South Korea’s Sammi Corp. Flames were shooting out of some of the buses, private TV station Geo reported.

“The European newspapers have abused our religion,” said Shaukat Khan, aged 22 and jobless, his eyes streaming from police tear gas near the burning bus stand. “We are expressing our anger. Usually protesters are peaceful, but some miscreants do bad things and other people join them.”

Paramilitary forces were deployed, and the government announced that schools and colleges would be closed in north-western Pakistan for one week to protect students from violence. Authorities also announced a ban on rallies in eastern Pakistan for an indefinite period. Demonstrations around Asia and the Middle East over the cartoons - which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and have been reprinted by other newspapers, mostly in the West - have subsided in recent days, including in Afghanistan where 11 people died in riots last week.

But the protests have gathered momentum in Pakistan this week. Islamic groups and traders’ associations have organised shutdowns and street rallies that have descended into violence. Intelligence officials say members of outlawed Islamic militant groups have joined the protests, and may be inciting violence to undermine the pro-Western government of President General Pervez Musharraf.

A senior police official said officers were investigating whether the rioting was planned. He said the main spark for the violent unrest appeared to be the events in Lahore on Tuesday, which encouraged youths to do the same in Peshawar.

Elsewhere in Asia, hundreds of protesters from the small Muslim minority ripped apart and burned Danish flags in a rally at the Danish honorary consulate in Manila, the Philippine capital.

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, the government ordered Guang Ming, the country’s third largest Chinese-language newspaper, to halt publication of its evening edition for two weeks as punishment for printing a photograph in which the cartoons were visible.

And in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia’s importers association said it was boycotting Danish goods to protest the publication of the cartoons in Denmark.