Global anti-Europe protests over Mohammed cartoons turn deadly
Police wielding batons and rifle butts, meanwhile, dispersed demonstrators walking toward the presidential palace in the city. Earlier in the day, 200 student demonstrators threw stones at the Austrian Embassy, breaking some windows and starting small fires.
"Long live Islam! We are Muslims! We don't let anyone insult our prophet!" chanted the demonstrators, many of whom appeared to be teenagers.
They also chanted, "Down with America!" and slogans against the Afghan and US presidents.
Some protesters moved toward the main American base in the city. Police watched but did not intervene.
The worst of the violence in Afghanistan was outside Bagram, the main US base, where Afghan police fired on 2,000 protesters as they tried to break into the heavily guarded facility, according to local government sources.
Two demonstrators were killed and 13 people, including eight police, were injured.
No US troops were involved in the clashes, 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, according to a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Two protesters were killed, and three other people were wounded, including two police.
The demonstrators also burned tires and threw stones at government offices. Thousands of other Afghans demonstrated peacefully in at least five other cities.
The unrest also spread to East Africa and police in Somalia fired in the air to disperse stone-throwing protesters, triggering a stampede in which a teenager was killed - aising to six the number of deaths in protests related to the publication of the series of cartoons satirising Islam's most revered figure.
In the lead up to the stampede, hundreds of protesters had thrown stones at police and aid workers after a peaceful rally in the northern port city of Bossaso.
At least nine people were injured in the melee outside the Danish Embassy in Iran, which lasted about an hour.
Two trees inside the compound which is believed to have been evacuated earlier were set alight by the firebombs. The embassy gate was burned as was a police booth protecting the building. The mob that gathered outside the embassy, which included about 100 women, burned a Danish flag and chanted "God is great," but they failed to breach a police cordon.
In London, a man who was pictured dressed as a suicide bomber during Muslim protests, outside the Danish embassy, today apologised "wholeheartedly" for his behaviour.
Omar Khayam's apology came as Downing Street condemned the demonstrations as "completely unacceptable" and Scotland Yard announced that a special squad had been set up to investigate placard-wielding extremists.
Mr Khayam, 22, of Bedford, said it was "wrong, unjustified and insensitive" to protest dressed a suicide bomber.
Two-hundred members of Iran's parliament, meanwhile, issued a statement warning that those who what have already been dubbed in the French press as the 'Satanic Illustrations', 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."
In a meeting with local authors, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned the cartoons and warned the West: ''Insulting the prophet Mohammed would not promote your position.
Lebanon, meanwhile, has apologised to Denmark after thousands of rampaging Muslim demonstrators set fire to the building housing the Danish mission in Beirut on Sunday
At least one person died, 30 were injured and about 200 people were detained in Sunday's violence, including Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese, officials said.
Beirut's violence came a day after violent protests in neighboring Syria, which saw the burning of the Danish and Norwegian missions. The United States accused the Syrian government of backing the protests in Lebanon and Syria, an accusation also made by anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians.
Washington has condemned the violence and urged governments to take steps to cool tensions over the 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten in September and recently reprinted in European and other media.
The drawings including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse have touched a raw nerve in part because Islamic law is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.
"We understand fully why people, why Muslims, find the cartoons offensive," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "Those who disagree with the views that were expressed, certainly have the right to condemn them, but they should be peaceful."
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as he entered the opening session a three-day UN Environment Program in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, implied that the publication of the caricatures had been a matter of poor judgment, but added: "In don't think that it justifies the attacks on innocents. I would appeal to all concerned, all people of authority and influence, to engage in dialogue and bring this to an end."
The prime ministers of Spain and Turkey issued a Christian-Muslim appeal for calm, meanwhile, saying "we shall all be the losers if we fail to immediately defuse this situation."
But Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said media freedoms cannot be limitless and that hostility against Muslims was replacing anti-Semitism in the West.
Several thousand Iraqis rallied in the southern city of Kut, burning Danish, German and Israeli flags, as well as an effigy of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to demand that diplomatic and economic ties be severed with countries where caricatures were published.
Protesters called for the death of anyone who insults Muhammad and demanded the withdrawal of 530-member Danish military contingent operating under British control.
Danish Capt. Philip Ulrichsen said Danish troops were shot at and targeted by stone-throwing youths on Sunday and a roadside bomb was defused, but no soldiers were wounded.
Melees also broke out during protests in New Delhi and Gaza City, while several thousand students massed peacefully in Cairo on the campus of al-Azhar University, the oldest and most important seat of Sunni Muslim learning in the world, to protest the drawings.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country would try to use its contacts with Arab countries to cool the violence. "We cannot allow this argument to become a battle between cultures," Steinmeier said.
France Soir, the first French newspaper to publish contested cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed last week, evacuated its offices this afternoon after receiving a threatening call, staff and police said.
Police said the caller threatened to blow himself up at the daily's offices in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers.
Police sent a team with sniffer dogs.
About 60 employees evacuated the building but were able to go back in two hours later.
Outraged Muslims today demanded an Australian newspaper apologise after it published one of a series of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked angry protests around the world.
The News Corp-owned Courier-Mail, the biggest newspaper in the Queensland state capital Brisbane, apparently became the first newspaper in Australia to publish one of the Danish caricatures on Saturday despite warnings from Muslim groups.
But the low-key cartoon that illustrated an article on page 17 about an attack on the Danish embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, by angry Muslims did not catch national attention until today.
The Islamic Council of Queensland president Abdul Jalal said the paper should apologise to the state's Muslims.
"I was hoping, praying that our media people would have more ... sense, in not trying to agitate the situation in the local scene here in Australia," Jalal told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
Courier-Mail editor David Fagan declined to comment.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
