Protesters ransack cities in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Protesters ransacked Western businesses in the city of Lahore and stormed a diplomatic enclave in the capital yesterday to vent their anger over caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in the worst such violence in Pakistan since the cartoon controversy erupted last month.

Two protesters in Lahore were killed when they tried to force their way into a bank and were shot by a security guard, authorities said.

Protesters in the historic eastern city burned a hotel, two banks, a KFC restaurant, and the office of Telenor, a Norwegian telecom company, as well as vehicles and two movie theaters, the Associated Press reported from Lahore. Tear gas and smoke from burning vehicles wafted through the center of the city as police fired shots in the air.

In Islamabad, hundreds of young men pushed past security guards and made their way into the heart of the main enclave for foreign embassies here. They vandalized cars, smashed windows of a branch of British bank Standard Chartered, and shouted slogans such as ''Expel European ambassadors" and ''Death to Denmark," the country where the cartoons originally were published in a newspaper. The Danish Embassy is situated outside the enclave.

Police used tear gas to drive the protesters out of the fenced, partially forested enclave once they had congregated near the Indian and British embassies. The heavily guarded US Embassy is deeper inside the enclave and was not directly affected.

The mocking cartoons have aroused intense anger around the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East, but Pakistan until this week had avoided violent protests like those that have roiled the capitals of Lebanon and Syria.

General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, has condemned the cartoons, and a number of peaceful protests have been held around the country. The protest campaign has included not just hard-line religious parties, whose leaders have called for prosecution of those responsible for the cartoons, but also mainstream secular parties. Earlier this month, Pakistan's Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the ''blasphemous and derogatory cartoons." Religious leaders say they are planning a series of ''million man" marches in major cities around the country over the next several weeks.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told reporters that the publication of the cartoons had ''created a big sense of unease," adding, ''Such acts cannot be condoned and must be condemned." Members of parliament from across the political spectrum marched from the parliament building to the enclave to hold a five-minute silent protest.

Last week, an editorial in the Friday Times, a liberal newsmagazine, said that Western governments, in defending the right of newspapers to publish the cartoons, had ''demeaned the West's lofty ideals and exposed the designs of its new crusaders." Lawmakers have called for a national transportation strike on March 3, although some say they are rethinking the idea in light of the escalating protests.

In the meantime, public anger has continued to build. On Monday, police in the city of Peshawar used tear gas to disperse a crowd of several thousand students after an anticartoon protest turned violent, and by yesterday the unrest had spread to Islamabad and Lahore, where many turned their fury on Western-owned businesses.