Angry Mideast Muslims protest alleged US Koran abuse
AFP
Date: 05-20-05
NASIRIYAH, Iraq (AFP) - Several thousand Muslims in the Middle East protested over the alleged abuse of the Koran at the US detention facility of Guantanamo Bay as clerics demanded an apology to stem a growing wave of fury.
Violence marred a demonstration in the southern Iraqi Shiite town of Nasiriyah, where four radical Shiites and four police and soldiers were wounded by gunshots, medical sources said.
The protest had been organized by Shiites loyal to the fiery cleric Moqtada Sadr, who earlier in the week had called on Iraqis to daub US and Israeli flags outside mosques so they could be soiled by the feet of the faithful.
A leading figure in Sadr's movement, Shiekh Ahmed Khafaji, accused the security forces of opening fire on the demonstrators, while police accused the "militias" of being the first to do so.
The imam of the great mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Abderrahmane Al-Soudis, told the faithful during Friday prayers that the United States should apologize swiftly to prevent a mounting wave of anger from growing any further.
"If this information is true, we will demand ... in the name of over one billion Muslims who venerate the Koran a rapid inquiry into the ignoble criminals ... so that the heaviest punishments are inflicted," he said according to the Spa agency.
"We also ask that excuses are given rapidly to Muslims to defuse the growing wave of anger... sparked by these worrying provocations."
Such provocations "will stir up tension unfortunately between peoples, and leave the doors wide open for conflicts that will perpetuate from generation to generation and which will end in a conflict of civilisations."
In Medina, the second most holy city of Islam, the imam of Friday prayers Abdel Bari Al-Thebiti predicted that the allleged desecration "would stir up feelings of anger among Muslims ... and feed extremism."
In the occupied Palestinian territories, more than 2,000 demonstrators held aloft a giant mock-up of the Koran and Hamas flags as they marched through the West Bank city of Nablus in a protest organized by the radical Islamist group.
Ranting at the crowd, local Hamas leader Maher al-Kharraz called on the United States to "apologise and punish those who desecrated the Koran".
In Iran, the faithful followed a call by the authorities for a protest against the alleged desecration after Friday prayers, official media said.
At the end of Friday prayers in Tehran, thousands shouted "death to America" and "death to Israel".
On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that on multiple occasions between early 2002 and mid-2003 detainees at Guantanamo Bay alleged that the Koran was being disrespected.
Riots have broken out across the Muslim world following a report in Newsweek magazine that US investigators had found that interrogators at the prison threw a Koran in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
The magazine this week retracted the story after its source developed doubts, and the Pentagon has said its own investigation has found no evidence to support the allegation that Korans were defiled at the off-shore US prison.
Source
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