Danish consulate torched in Beirut

Angry demonstrators set the Danish consulate in Beirut ablaze yesterday, and the violent turn in protests over publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad drew condemnation from European capitals and moderate Muslims.

Syrians set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday. They damaged the Swedish embassy and tried to storm the French mission but were held off by riot police.

"The Danish government urges all leaders, political and religious, in the countries concerned to call on their populations to remain calm and refrain from violence," Denmark's Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said after the latest attacks.

Denmark is the focus for Muslim rage as images that Muslims find offensive, including one of the Prophet with a turban resembling a bomb, first appeared in a Danish daily in what has become a face-off between press freedom and religious respect.

The Danish Foreign Ministry urged Danes yesterday to leave Lebanon and advised its citizens not to travel there.

One protester, among those who set the consulate on fire in Beirut, was encircled by flames and died after jumping from the third floor. Police fired tear gas to disperse the volatile protest involving thousands of people. Sixty people were arrested.

"The violence now - particularly the burning of Danish missions abroad - is absolutely outrageous," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, adding:

"The vast majority of people of the Muslim faith in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have exercised their right to protest about these cartoons in an entirely peaceful way."

As peaceful demonstrations turned to ransacking Danish diplomatic offices and burning them in Syria and Lebanon, world leaders as well as prominent moderate Muslims appealed for calm.

"This has nothing to do with Islam at all," Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told Future television. "Destabilising security and vandalism give a wrong image of Islam. Prophet Mohammad cannot be defended this way."

In the row, newspapers have insisted on their right to print the cartoons, citing freedom of speech, but for Muslims depicting the Prophet Mohammad is prohibited by Islam.

Protests about the cartoons raged at the weekend from Lahore to Gaza but mainstream moderate Muslim groups spoke out to warn against radicals hijacking the affair. As well as in Denmark, cartoons of the Prophet have been reprinted in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway and Poland.

On yesterday's violence in Beirut, Mohammad Rashid Qabani, Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim cleric, said no matter how strongly Muslims felt about the cartoons they must exercise restraint. "We don't want the expression of our condemnation (of the cartoons) to be used by some to portray a distorted image of Islam," he said. The world's leading Islamic body rejected the violence. "Overreactions surpassing the limits of peaceful democratic acts... are dangerous and detrimental to the efforts to defend the legitimate case of the Muslim world," the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference said in a statement.

"Should we burn and destroy things? Setting fire to embassies and destroying them is wrong. The solution lies in diplomacy, not in guns," Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said. "That (violence) is what those who seek a clash of civilisations want."