InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
ISLAMABAD -- Thousands of Islamist activists in Pakistan staged new demonstrations Saturday against a US-made anti-Islam film, as the death toll from the previous day's violent protests rose to 21.
And in Nigeria, tens of thousands of people protested on the streets of the country’s second city of Kano.
More than 5,000 protesters marched towards the parliament in Islamabad, including hundreds of women, chanting "We love our Holy Prophet" and "Punishment for those who humiliated our Prophet."
Some 500 people from the hardline Islamist group Jamaat-ud-Dawa staged a protest in front of the US consulate in the eastern city of Lahore, chanting "The US deserves only one remedy -- jihad, jihad."
The protests were peaceful, in contrast to the previous day's demonstrations.
Religious groups said they were also planning demonstrations in Karachi, the scene of the worst violence on Friday, after the funerals of some of those killed during the protests.
Protests against the film "Innocence of Muslims," which mocks Islam, have erupted across the Muslim world and tens of thousands took to the streets across Asia and the Middle East Friday as Western missions closed amid fears of violence.
Anger has also been stoked by the publication in a French magazine of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
On Friday the violence was worst in Pakistan with witnesses estimating that nationwide rallies mobilized more than 45,000, mainly members of right-wing religious parties and supporters of banned terror groups, although the numbers were still small in a country of 180 million.
Four more people died overnight from wounds they received during the protests, taking the number killed across Pakistan in the day of demonstrations to 21.
Fifteen people were killed in Karachi, the country's largest city, and six in the northwestern city of Peshawar, health department officials said.
The combined total of wounded in Karachi, Peshawar and in the capital Islamabad was 229.
"The total death toll from the anti-Islam film protests reached 15 in Karachi as three more succumbed to their injuries overnight," Sagheer Ahmed, provincial health minister in southern Sindh province, told AFP.
Mukhtiar Khan, a senior doctor at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar said that one more person died from his wounds in hospital, taking the total killed in the city to six.
Overall, 23 people have been killed in Pakistan during protests over the past week.
In Nigeria, an AFP reporter said the crowd of demonstrators stretched several kilometers through the city, the largest in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north, with protesters shouting "death to America, death to Israel and death to the enemies of Islam."
The rally was organized by the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, a pro-Iranian group that adheres to the Shiite branch of Islam, which has operated in Africa's most populous country since the late 1970s.
"We are out today to express our rage and disapproval over this blasphemous film," said Muhammed Turi, a protest leader and member of the Islamic Movement that organized a similar rally earlier this week in the city of Zaria.
"This protest is also aimed at calling on the US government to put a halt to further blasphemy against Islam," he added.
Demonstrators carried pictures of US President Barack Obama, as well as American and Israeli flags as they marched towards a palace owned by the Emir of Kano, the top religious figure in the city of roughly 4.5 million people. Others were waving Iranian flags, the AFP reporter witnessed. Police and military personnel were deployed around the city.
"The prophet means everything to us. He means more than our lives ... Any blasphemy against him is like an invitation to war," said protester Husseini Ibrahim.
Turi also urged Nigeria's government to publicly denounce the film and said all ties with Israel should be severed.
Thousands of Muslims protested in Zaria on Thursday, burning US and Israeli flags.
The previous week in the religiously divided central Nigerian city of Jos, soldiers fired live rounds outside a mosque to disperse a crowd of several hundred that was seeking to demonstrate against the film.
Nigeria's 160 million people are roughly divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south, and Muslim-Christian tensions have often led to deadly confrontation.
An article in one of Nigeria's leading newspapers in 2002 considered blasphemous by Muslims helped spark deadly riots in the northern city of Kaduna in which 3,000 people were killed.
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