19 Reported Dead as Pakistanis Protest Muhammad Video

Violent crowds furious over an anti-Islamic video made in the United States convulsed Pakistan’s largest cities on Friday, leaving up to 19 people dead and more than 160 injured in a day of government-sanctioned protests.

It was the worst single day of violence in a Muslim country over the video, “Innocence of Muslims,” since protests began nearly two weeks ago in Egypt, before spreading to two dozen countries. Protesters have ignored the United States government’s denunciation of the video.

Friday’s violence in Pakistan began with a television station employee dying from gunshot wounds during a protest in the northwestern city of Peshawar, then was amplified through armed protests in the southern port city of Karachi that left between 12 and 14 people dead, Pakistani news media reported.

By nightfall Geo, the leading television station, was reporting 19 deaths around the country. Less violent protests occurred in other Muslim countries but were exacerbated by the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a French satirical weekly. In Bangladesh, several thousand Islamist activists took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, waving banners and burning a symbolic coffin for President Obama that was draped with the American flag. “Death to the United States and death to French,” they chanted. Local television networks reported that a mobs ransacked and burned an Anglican church in Mardan in northwestern Pakistan. A statement by The Bishop of Peshawar the Rt. Rev. Humphrey Peters said that newly installed computers were stolen before the church was set on fire. There were no reports of killings or injuries to the Christians.In Tunisia, the government invoked emergency powers to outlaw all demonstrations; American diplomatic posts in India, Indonesia and elsewhere closed for the day. France closed embassies and other institutions in 20 countries while, in Paris, some Muslim leaders urged their followers to heed a government ban on weekend demonstrations. “There will be strictly no exceptions. Demonstrations will be banned and broken up,” said Manuel Valls, the French interior minister. In Pakistan, the streets erupted from early morning in Peshawar, where protesters burned two movie theaters. Two people, including the television employee, Muhammad Amir, were killed. Mr. Amir’s employer broadcast graphic footage of hospital staff giving him emergency treatment shortly before he died, which other Pakistani journalists condemned as insensitive and irresponsible. Some protesters tried to reach the city’s heavily guarded American Consulate, which has a strong Central Intelligence Agency component. By evening, hospital officials said at least five people were dead and more than 50 injured. After Friday Prayer, more severe violence erupted in Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan and Karachi, where normally bustling streets were instead filled with clouds of tear gas and the sound of gunfire. Protesters in Karachi burned effigies, stoned a KFC and engaged in armed clashes with the police that left 14 people dead and more than 80 wounded by evening. Peaceful protests had been approved by Pakistan’s government which declared Friday a national holiday, the “Day of Love for the Prophet Muhammad,” as part of an effort to either control, or politically capitalize on, rage against the inflammatory video, which depicts the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as a sexually perverted buffoon. “An attack on the holy prophet is an attack on the core belief of 1.5 billion Muslims. Therefore, this is something that is unacceptable,” said Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in an address to a religious conference Friday morning in Islamabad. Mr. Ashraf called on the United Nations and international community to formulate a law outlawing hate speech across the world. “Blasphemy of the kind witnessed in this case is nothing short of hate speech, equal to the worst kind of anti-Semitism or other kind of bigotry,” he said. But chaotic scenes in the streets outside suggested that if the government had aimed to harness public anger on the issue, it had dismally failed. In contrast, the day passed off peacefully in neighboring Afghanistan where officials had been preparing for the protests for days. Clerics at major mosques in the capital, Kabul, acceded to official requests that they preach peace, or another topic entirely; police officers set up a cordon of check posts to search cars, and no street violence occurred. A senior American official in Kabul said his Afghan counterparts had worked hard to mute the impact of the video through the week. That was, in part, a product of their prior experience with what he called “a desecration or religious event.” In Pakistan, however, extremist groups, many of them officially banned by the government, were at the forefront of the upheavals. Karachi marchers included members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned Sunni sectarian group, Harkat-ul Muhahideen, which has fought against Indian troops in Kashmir, and Tehrik-e-Ghalba Islami, a faction of another sectarian group. In Islamabad, Sipa-e-Sahaba Pakistan activists led a march toward the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave, where Western missions had closed for the day. They clashed for hours with police officers outside the five-star Serena Hotel, before eventually being pushed back. Meanwhile in Lahore, activists from the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader Hafiz Saeed is subject to a $10 million United States government bounty, led protesters toward the American Consulate, which had its perimeter defenses breached earlier in the week.The devastation caused by the protests belied their relatively small size. The largest street mobs were estimated to have between 5,000 and 10,000 people — less than would typically attend a mainstream political rally, or even a high-profile funeral in some parts of the country. Instead most Pakistanis drifted home after Friday Prayer, apparently keen to avoid the trouble. Still, many analysts questioned the government’s decision to give free rein to the marchers. “Pakistan is a conservative but not a radicalized society,” said Cyril Almeida, a writer with the English-language Dawn newspaper. “But when the radical fringe is bold enough, it can hold society hostage. And that’s what happened today.” The government tried to control the momentum of unrest by cutting off cellphone coverage in large cities for most of the day and, in Islamabad, sealed all exits to the city after Friday Prayer. That left most Pakistanis stuck at home, many relying on e-mail and social media sites, like Twitter, to voice their frustrations. “We are not a nation. We are a mob,” said Nadeem F. Paracha, a cultural commentator with Dawn newspaper, on Twitter. Imran Khan, the cricket hero turned conservative politician, addressed one of the Islamabad protest rallies, and used to occasion to condemn American drone strikes in the northwestern tribal belt.“There is no end to this war,” he said. The State Department spent $70,000 on Urdu-language advertisements that were broadcast on several television channels, dissociating the United States government from the inflammatory video. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the American chargé d’affaires, Ambassador Richard Hoagland, and requested that he have “Innocence of Muslims” removed from YouTube. It seemed a quixotic request, as YouTube had already been entirely blocked in Pakistan for several days previously. In a statement, Mr. Hoagland said he had told Pakistani officials that the video represented “a deeply insensitive decision by a single individual to disseminate hatred" and did not reflect American values. The protests largely abated by nightfall, allowing main roads in most cities to reopen, as hospital staff continued to tend to the injured. The government expressed some frustration at the day’s events. “What kind of a love for the Prophet is this where people are burning and looting?” said Qamar Zaman Kaira, the information minister, in a television interview, before berating the media for giving excessive coverage to the trouble. “You should stop giving live coverage of protests,” he said testily as he spoke to a news presenter. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris; Julfikar Ali Manik from Dhaka, Bangladesh; Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Zia Ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan, and Waqar Gilani from Lahore, Pakistan.