100 protest in Bangladesh over anti-Islam film

Photo taken from google maps

DHAKA, Bangladesh—About 100 protesters burned the United States’ flag and chanted slogans in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on Thursday to demonstrate against an anti-Islam Internet film.

The demonstrators, mostly students at Islamic seminaries, hit the flag with shoes before setting it ablaze in front of the Baitul Mokarram Mosque, Bangladesh’s biggest mosque.

Chanting “God is Greater,” “We won’t accept mocking of Prophet Mohammed” and “Down with American imperialism,” the protesters held up traffic at a major road junction in the city.

“America should apologize immediately and arrest the people who’ve made the film,” Shah Ahmadullah Ashraf, head of Bangladesh Khalefat Andolon, a small Islamic party that organized the rally, told the crowd.

He said the US embassy in Dhaka could be targeted and called for nationwide protests after Friday prayers.

Bangladesh police said they had boosted security at the embassy to prevent any repeat of violence that left four Americans including the US ambassador dead in Libya on Tuesday.

The low-budget amateur film made in the US ridicules the Prophet Mohammed by associating him with sex and themes of pedophilia and homosexuality.

Some 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 153 million people are Muslims. The country saw protests by tens of thousands of people against the publication of Mohammed cartoons by a Danish newspaper in 2006.