RIAZ KHAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A Pakistani cleric offered a 1.5 million rupee ($25,000 U.S.) reward and a car to anyone who kills the cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad, while another Islamist leader was put under house detention amid fears of more deadly demonstrations, officials said Friday.
Thousands of security forces were deployed across the country to prevent unrest. Police arrested 125 protesters for violating a ban on rallies in eastern Pakistan and arrested 30 others after firing tear gas to disperse a protest in the southern city of Karachi. Thousands staged rallies in other cities. Denmark temporarily closed its embassy in Pakistan, officials said.
Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, prayer leader at the historic Mohabat Khan mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar, announced the mosque and the Jamia Ashrafia religious school he leads would give a 1.5 million rupee ($25,000) reward and a car for killing the cartoonist of the prophet pictures that appeared first in a Danish newspaper in September.
He also said a local jewellers' association would give $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.
"Whoever has done this despicable and shameful act, he has challenged the honour of Muslims. Whoever will kill this cursed man, he will get $1 million dollars from the association of the jewellers bazaar, one million rupees from Masjid Mohabat Khan and 500,000 rupees and a car from Jamia Ashrafia as a reward," Qureshi said.
"This is a unanimous decision of by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize," Qureshi said.
He did not name the cartoonist in his announcement, made to about 1,000 people outside the mosque after Friday prayers. They burned a flag of Denmark and an effigy of the Danish prime minister.
Sirajul Haq, a senior minister in the provincial government — which is run by a hard-line Islamic coalition — told the same gathering that the government should demand the extradition of the cartoonist and put him on trial in Pakistan.
Elsewhere in Peshawar, where violent protests on Wednesday left two dead and scores injured, police fired tear gas to disperse more than 1,000 people who were trying to block a street. Several people were arrested, said a witness, Khizar Hayat.
In a main street in the city, four effigies representing Danish, German, French and Norwegian leaders were hanged from lamp posts.
Police in eastern Punjab province, meanwhile, were ordered to restrict the movement of all religious leaders who might address any rallies and round up religious activists "who could be any threat to law and order," a senior police official said in Lahore, the provincial capital.
In Multan, another city in Punjab province, about 300 police swooped down on 125 protesters, who gathered at a traffic circle, chanting, "We are slaves of the prophet," and trampling on a Danish flag, said Sharif Zafar, a police official.
Protesters shouted "Death to Musharraf" as they were bundled into two police buses, referring to Pakistan's leader, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Zafar said they were being taken to a police station because they were violating a ban on rallies in Punjab which was declared after deadly riots in Lahore on Tuesday.
In Karachi, police fired tear gas and swung batons to disperse about 2,000 protesters, many wielding sticks, who blocked the main highway into the southern city, said Alim Jafari, a Karachi police official. The road was cleared and some 30 protesters were detained, he said.
The crackdown follows violent protests in Pakistan this week in which five people died and Western businesses were vandalized and burned.
Clerics at mosques across the country condemned the cartoons.
"Oh God, please punish those who dared to publish these sacrilegious cartoons ... Give enough power to the Muslim countries and enable them to take revenge," said Qari Saeed Ullah, a prayer leader in Islamabad.
The cartoons first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and have since been condemned as blasphemous by the Muslim world. One of the drawings shows Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with an ignited fuse.
In Islamabad, former U.S. President Bill Clinton criticized the cartoons but said Muslims wasted an opportunity to build better ties with the West by holding violent protests.
"I can tell you most people in the United States deeply respect Islam ... and most people in Europe do," he said. Clinton was visiting to sign an agreement with Pakistan's government on an HIV-AIDS project by his charitable foundation.
Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, chief of the radical group Jamaat al-Dawat, became the first religious leader detained by authorities since protests began in Pakistan early this month. He was due to make a speech in Faisalabad, about 120 kilometres away.
Intelligence officials have said scores of members of Jamaat al-Dawat and assorted militant groups joined the Lahore protest on Tuesday and had incited the violence in a bid to undermine Musharraf's government.
Witnesses said that about 7,000 staged a protest at Rawalpindi, near the capital, on Friday and another 5,000 in the southwestern city of Quetta. There were no immediate reports of violence.
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