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'A black day for Muslims'
06/02/2006 07:56 - (SA)
Beirut - Muslim rage over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad spilled out of Syria on Sunday into neighbouring Lebanon where thousands of rampaging protesters - undaunted by police tear gas and water cannons - torched the Danish mission and ransacked a Christian neighbourhood.
Muslim clerics denounced the violence, with some wading into the mobs trying to stop them barehanded. Copenhagen ordered Danes to leave the country or stay indoors, in the second day of Mideast violence against its diplomatic outposts.
The first apparent victim of the political fall-out from the violence was Interior Minister Hassan Sabei, who submitted his resignation during an emergency cabinet meeting chaired by President Emile Lahoud.
Sabei said 1 200 security men and 1 600 army troops had been deployed in the area and had done their best to prevent what was supposed to be a peaceful protest from turning violent. "But things out of hand when elements that had infiltrated into the ranks of the demonstrators broke through security shields... ."
Protests all over the world
Earlier on Sunday Saniora said before meeting with top Islamic leaders that about 200 people, more than half of them Syrians and Palestinians, were detained by security forces and were being questioned. A police statement said 76 Syrians, 35 Palestinians and 38 Lebanese were among the detained.
The Danish and Norwegian missions in Syria were set ablaze by thousands of protesters on Saturday in what until then had been the most violent in a string of angry demonstrations across the Muslim world.
The Syrian state-run daily newspaper Al-Thawra said Denmark was to blame because its government had not apologised for the September publication of the caricatures of the prophet in the Jyllands-Posten. The drawings subsequently have been republished in several European newspapers as a statement on behalf of a free press.
In Copenhagen, Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller called for cooler heads to prevail.
"The government has no intention to insult Muslims,"
The growing Muslim outrage and increasingly violent protests found their way onto the agenda of a German meeting of the world's top defence officials, who appealed for calm and urged respect for both religious and press freedoms.
In Beirut, the protest spiralled out of control for several hours and spread to the Christian neighbourhood where the Danish Embassy was located.
The Danish Foreign Ministry urged Danes to leave Lebanon quickly. The violence on Saturday in Damascus prompted a similar warning.
Another Muslim cleric, Yahya Daouk, said a peaceful and civilised protest was planned, but some "hooligans" ignored calls for restraint. "They attacked us and beat us," he said.
After attacking the Danish mission, protesters began stoning the nearby St Maroun Church, one of the city's main Maronite Catholic churches, and private property in the Ashrafieh neighbourhood.
Legislator Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim who heads a majority bloc in Parliament, said "it is a black day for Muslims in Lebanon.
There have been displays of anger in other parts of the Muslim world, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Egypt.
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