The American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three embassy officials were killed Tuesday when a mob attacked the US consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, the interior ministry said.
Protests continue in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and fears of spreading to other Arab states in the Middle East Region. The protestors are angry at an American produced Film that defames Islam.
Libyan security guards were also killed and wounded during the attack, The Libyan incident came hours after thousands of Egyptian demonstrators Tuesday tore down the Stars and Sripes at the US embassy in Cairo and replaced it with a black Islamic flag, similar to one adopted by several militant groups.
Ibrahim Dabbashi, Libya’s deputy UN ambassador, told reporters that up to 10 Libyan security personnel were casualties of the attack on Tuesday. “Some of them have been killed at the start of the attack,” he said.
The envoy who was visiting Benghazi died when an armed mob protesting against a film deemed offensive to Islam attacked the US mission, hours after Islamists also stormed Washington’s embassy in the Egyptian capital Cairo.
Stevens, a career diplomat, had been in Libya for less than four months after taking up his post in Tripoli in May.
The Libya posting had marked a high honour for Stevens who had served as the No. 2 diplomat at the US Embassy in Tripoli from 2007 to 2009, when Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi was in power.
He later served as the US envoy to the National Transitional Council, the umbrella resistance group that opposed Gaddafi during the revolt last year. In January, he was nominated for the top job in Libya.
Israeli-American Sam Bacile, a 52-year-old real-estate developer, made “Innocence of Muslims”, the film at the centre of the anti-US protests and he describes Islam as a “cancer” and depicts the Prophet Mohammed sleeping with women.
“Islam is a cancer,” Bacile told the Wall Street Journal of his film, which depicts the Prophet Mohammed variously sleeping with women, talking about killing children and referring to a donkey as “the first Muslim animal.”
The film is being promoted by controversial Florida pastor Terry Jones, who has drawn protests in the past for burning the Koran and vehemently opposing the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York.
Witnesses said the attackers ripped up a US flag, then looted the consulate before setting it on fire on the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“Dozens of demonstrators attacked the consulate and set fire to it,” said a Benghazi resident, adding that he had seen the flames and heard shots in the vicinity.
Nearly 3 000 demonstrators, most of them Islamist supporters of the Salafist movement, gathered at the embassy in protest over the film.
In Cairo, dozens of protesters then scaled the embassy walls, went into the courtyard and took down the flag from a pole.
They brought it back to the crowd outside, which tried to burn it, but failing that, tore it apart.
The protesters on the wall then raised on the flagpole a black flag with the Muslim declaration of faith on it: “There is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet.”
AFP
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