4 more killed in furor over cartoons

BERLIN -- As protests over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed grew more violent and four people were killed by police in Afghanistan, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called yesterday for an end to religious-inspired attacks on diplomatic compounds and other unrest sweeping the Islamic world.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country is mounting a major diplomatic push to cool tempers. ''We cannot allow this argument to become a battle between cultures," he told reporters.

Annan's statement, issued on the UN's website, came as an Iranian mob tried to torch the Austrian Embassy in Tehran, hurling rocks and igniting small fires before being turned back by police.

Protests have spiraled over the Danish political cartoons, which in recent days have been reprinted in dozens of Western newspapers, mainly in Europe. The Islamic Army in Iraq, a major insurgent group, posted an Internet statement urging attacks on citizens of any country where the cartoons appeared.

Annan implored Muslims to halt the violence, saying that offense given by the drawings doesn't justify attacks on embassies or calls by militants to spill European blood in retaliation for the pen-and-ink caricatures of Islam's founder.

''Such resentment cannot justify violence, least of all when it is directed at people who have no responsibility for, or control over, the publications in question," Annan said, adding his voice to those of European politicians and Muslim leaders urging calm.

Afghan police opened fire on demonstrators in several cities, with two protesters killed in Bagram, near the site of the largest United States military base in the country, and two more in Mihtarlam, capital of Laghman Province. In Egypt, thousands of students massed peacefully on the Cairo campus of al-Azhar University.

In India's Muslim-dominated province of Kashmir, businesses and schools were closed in protest against the caricatures, and there were reports of scattered violence. Palestinian police used cudgels to beat back unruly crowds gathering outside European Union offices in Gaza. Thousands of Iraqis rallied to demand that the country sever diplomatic ties with European countries where the cartoons have appeared, burning German flags and an effigy of the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The prime ministers of Spain and Turkey issued an ecumenical appeal for an end to violence by Muslims and disrespect for Islam among Europeans. ''We shall all be losers if we fail to immediately defuse this situation," stated Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Spain's Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in a column that appeared in the International Herald Tribune.

Both Lebanon and Syria pledged investigations into how firebomb-hurling protesters were able to destroy Danish diplomatic missions in those countries over the weekend.

But Iran, which is embroiled in an unrelated dispute with Western countries over alleged efforts by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, took a hard line on the cartoons. In a Tehran, chief government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham said that ''the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to sacrifice its life for its belief in Islam and the honor of the prophet."

He called the cartoons symptomatic of the West's ''anti-Islamic and Islamophobic current -- which will be answered."

No major Austrian newspaper has published the offending cartoons and there was media speculation in Europe that the country's embassy was targeted at least partly because Vienna, the Austrian capital, is home to the International Atomic Energy Agency -- which on Saturday formally reported questions about Iran's nuclear program to the UN Security Council. Another possible explanation is that Austria presently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, and was being singled out as proxy for the entire continent.

Over the past week, as local disturbances over the cartoons in Copenhagen exploded into an international crisis, the cartoons have been reprinted by newspapers in Bulgaria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Australia, and the United States, with nearly all of them arguing in accompanying editorials that free expression is a higher value in democracies than respect for the rules of a single religion.

Islamic tradition forbids physical depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, out of fear that spiritual devotion to God might be subverted by idolatry.

In the United States, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League criticized the cartoon depictions of Mohammed as disturbing, especially one that casts the Prophet as a terrorist with a bomb for a turban. But Andrew Tarsy, New England director of the League, also pointed out that newspapers in Muslim countries often run grotesquely anti-Semitic cartoons under the guise of criticizing Israel.

''What has been overlooked in this controversy is the reality that despicable anti-Jewish caricatures appear daily in newspapers across the Arab and Muslim world," said Tarsy. ''Arab and Muslim leaders have refused to take any action to stem the drumbeat of anti-Semitism in widely circulated newspapers, many state-sponsored."

As Islamic countries have angrily demanded formal apologies, exasperated European politicians have tried to explain that they can neither control what appears in newspapers nor issue apologies on behalf of independent news media.

Militants have quickly seized on the cartoons. Islamic groups marching in London over the weekend waved banners pledging a ''9/11 for Europe."

In a phone interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. from Beirut, Omar Bakri Mohammad, leader of the Islamic group Muhajiroon, a violent radical group rooted in Britain's Muslim immigrant community, demanded death for anyone involved in the cartoons.