Lebanon's Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh resigned hours after demonstrators set fire to the Danish consulate in Beirut on Sunday to protest against caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad first published by a Danish newspaper.

He said he had refused to give security forces the order to fire on the protestors because "I did not want to be responsible for any carnage.

"Despite the intervention of more than 1,000 members of the security forces, we were unable to impose order because of the determination of the protestors, who numbered several thousand."

About 2,000 Lebanese staged a sit-in outside the Danish consulate on Sunday and the initially peaceful protest turned violent as protestors attempted to break through the security barrier which prompted the police to use tear gas and water cannons to disperse them, witnesses said.

The angry protestors then torched the building housing the consulate, said witnesses, adding that dozens of people were wounded in the clashes with riot police and a number of cars were set on fire.

 
The violence erupted the day after a similar attack on the embassies of Denmark and Norway in neighboring Syria over the publication in their countries of the caricatures of the Muslim prophet.

The United States accused the Syrian government of backing the protests in Lebanon and Syria.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement that the resentment over the caricatures "cannot justify violence, least of all when directed at people who have no responsibility for, or control over, the publications in question."

The Danish Foreign Ministry urged Danes to leave Lebanon quickly. The violence Saturday in Damascus prompted a similar warning.

"The government has no intention to insult Muslims," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said on public radio in Copenhagen. "We are trying to explain to everyone that enough is enough."

Thousands also took to the streets elsewhere in the Muslim world and parts of Europe, including some 3,000 Afghans who burned a Danish flag and demanding that the editors at Jyllands-Posten be prosecuted for blasphemy.

European leaders also urged calm and respect — both for religion and freedom of the press.

"The violence now, particularly the burning of Danish missions abroad, is absolutely outrageous and totally unjustified, and what we want to see is this matter being calmed down," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in London, adding that the media must exercise its free speech privilege responsibly.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier pushed for intercultural dialogue.

Government and religious leaders in Lebanon, Christian and Muslim, urged unity, and Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, issued an edict banning violence, saying it "harms Islam and Prophet Muhammad the same as the others (the publishers of the cartoons) did."

But Iran's Foreign Ministry announced Tehran had recalled its ambassador to Denmark, joining Syria, Saudi Arabia and Libya in pulling diplomatic representatives.

Iraqi Transport Minister Salam al-Maliki also said his country would cancel its contracts with Danish firms and reject reconstruction money from Copenhagen.

(Xinhua News Agency, Chinadaily.com via agencies February 6, 2006)