Pakistan cartoon protesters burn Danish PM effigy
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 22:54:00 02/15/2008
ISLAMABAD -- Hundreds of youths rallied in Pakistani cities and burned an effigy of the Danish Prime Minister Friday in protest at the reprinting of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, witnesses said.
Chanting "Death to the cartoonist," protesters in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and other locations demanded that the Pakistani government cut diplomatic relations with Denmark and boycott Danish goods.
"The punishment for blasphemy in Islam is death," Islamist leader Hafiz Hamidullah told a student rally in northwestern Peshawar, where about 500 students demonstrated.
Seventeen Danish dailies printed the drawing on Wednesday, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after police in Denmark foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.
In the port city of Karachi, students staged a rally outside a medical college while another rally by a religious party later burned the effigy of Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Dozens of students from the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami party thrashed a dummy of the cartoonist with shoes and then set it ablaze at a demonstration in the central city of Multan, joined by about 150 local traders.
"We will not shy from sacrificing our lives for this sacred cause," Multan traders community leader Tariq Mehmood Malik said.
The participants chanted slogans against US President George W. Bush and criticized the government of President Pervez Musharraf for not taking up the issue with Danish authorities.
"The Danish media have raised the issue after a gap of two years to trigger anarchy and violence in the Muslim world," local cleric Abdul Ghaffar told reporters.
In the eastern city of Lahore, 100 people carrying banners and placards set fire to a Danish flag in front of a Muslim shrine.
Five people died in Pakistan in February 2006 during violent protests against the cartoons, while a Pakistani cleric offered a reward of $1 million and a new car for anyone who killed any of the cartoonists.
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