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Anger Over U.S. Attacks Explodes into Violence on Pakistan's Streets
KARACHI, Oct 12 (News Agencies) - Tens of thousands of Muslim demonstrators rampaged through Pakistan's biggest city Friday, shooting and throwing stones at police, as anger over U.S. attacks on Afghanistan exploded into violence, news agencies reported.
At least six people were treated in the city's hospitals for bullet wounds, hospital sources said, but there were no reports of fatalities, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
Protestors had defied government warnings of a harsh crackdown from security forces to take to the streets of this southern city, which is also Pakistan's main business center.
An AFP reporter at the scene saw security forces firing tear gas at protestors and repeated volleys of live ammunition into the air in a bid to control a stone-throwing crowd that initially numbered about 3,000 people.
As the numbers of demonstrators rose to about 20,000 after afternoon prayers at mosques, it quickly became apparent the police could not control the situation and they withdrew from the area.
But they quickly returned with reinforcements and the air filled with tear gas as clashes spread throughout the central and western districts of Karachi.
Police said some demonstrators had fired directly on them.
Earlier in the day, hundreds of people tried to set a government complaints office on fire in the poor Lyari district of Karachi.
The protestors broke into the building and ransacked offices but police managed to get them out by firing tear gas before the building could be set ablaze.
Tear gas was also used to disperse a crowd of up to 400 people who attacked a KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) outlet in the western district of the city. The outlet, seen as a symbol of American culture, was partially damaged by fire.
Protestors attempting to impose a complete shutdown of the city ordered passengers off a bus then set it ablaze.
There were also reports of factories being attacked in the industrial part of western Karachi, which is dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, the main group in Afghanistan and the support base for the ruling Taliban.
Government officials underlined there had been little unrest elsewhere in Pakistan and that the protest movement was not broad-based.
"There are some elements who do not agree with the government and they are holding protests."
Foreign ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan played down the clashes, saying, "we are a large country of 140 million people and across the country the situation is normal."
Friday's violence in Karachi followed an overnight grenade attack on a police van that injured three officers and two civilians.
In the southwestern city of Quetta, another big center for Afghan refugees where five people were killed in demonstrations this week, about 25,000 people gathered at a sporting oval chanting "Death to America".
But with security forces deployed in huge numbers, the rally did not turn violent.
Demonstrators blocked highways around the northwestern city Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, and around 5,000 people gathered in the city center to burn effigies of U.S. President George W. Bush.
One of them, a 19-year-old Afghan refugee called Sajad, said nobody could support the September 11th terror attacks on the United States. "But look at what the Americans are doing in Palestine or Iraq. They are the real terrorists."
A demonstration in the important eastern city of Lahore ended peacefully.
President Pervez Musharraf has offered Pakistan's full cooperation to U.S.-led efforts to wipe out the al-Qaeda network of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
But he has risked a potentially explosive confrontation with a small minority among his own people who see bin Laden as a hero and the Taliban as the protectors of Islam.
The government had warned prior to Friday's protests that any of the three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan who were arrested would be deported.
Some 300 people, including two senior leaders of the Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, which has close links to the Taliban, were arrested earlier this week.
Police in the southwestern town of Jacobabad, where U.S. planes are understood to be establishing a logistics base, on Friday rounded up dozens of activists and sealed off a seminary.
Jacobabad is home to one of two airports that Pakistan has agreed to let U.S. forces use for possible search and recovery operations if troops or pilots get trapped in Afghanistan.
Noisy demonstrations broke out elsewhere in the Islamic world, but violence was limited, and the numbers taking part fell short of what might have been expected in south Asia's teeming cities.
In mainly Muslim Malaysia, police fired a water cannon to disperse some 2,000 protesters outside the U.S. embassy.
In the southeast Iranian city of Zahedan, near the border with Afghanistan, a crowd of around 3,000 anti-U.S. protesters - mainly Afghan refugees - broke the windows of the Pakistani consulate, police said.
In Jakarta, capital of Indonesia with the world's largest Muslim population, police used a water cannon on around 1,000 demonstrators, and in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka some 5,000 noisy demonstrators blocked traffic.
Protests were also expected in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian police mounted a large security operation but sought to steer clear of crowds to avoid provoking a repeat of the clashes on Monday that left two dead.
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