5 Pakistanis Die in Anti-American Riot

Five demonstrators were shot and killed Sunday and 80 people were seriously injured when Pakistani riot police opened fire on thousands of protesters attacking the U.S. cultural center here after a demonstration against the British novel “The Satanic Verses” turned into a rock-throwing anti-American melee.

None of the three Americans or 15 Pakistani employees inside the center at the time were hurt, but thousands of dollars in damage was done to the building, which houses an American library and sponsors cultural events designed to reinforce U.S.-Pakistani ties.

“It was a peaceful demonstration that went wrong,” said Kent Obee, head of the U.S. Information Service in Pakistan. Obee was inside the building waiting to receive a petition from the protesters when the riot erupted.

“Some kids started throwing rocks, and it got ugly. . . . They just began stoning the building, and the police responded.”

The march was initiated by fundamentalists demanding that the United States ban the novel, outlawed here, as blasphemous. They say it offends Muslims by suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed was fallible.

Officials said police opened fire only after trying to control the demonstration with tear gas, an effort they said failed because the wind was blowing the wrong way. But journalists and witnesses described the police riot-control operation as incompetent.

The demonstrators picked up tear-gas canisters and threw them back at police and several times outflanked the police, who ultimately opened fire in panic, witnesses said. After firing shots into the air, the police lowered their guns, and the shooting went on intermittently for nearly 90 minutes, according to the witnesses. Twenty of the injured were police.

Shouting “American dogs!” and “God is great!” the demonstrators also smashed their way into the center and set two small fires, but U.S. officials said the fervor of the mob did not match the attack of a decade ago on U.S. facilities here.

“It wasn’t another 1979,” Obee said. “It was just an unfortunate event that everyone wishes had never happened.”

Burned to the Ground

Ten years ago, a mob of thousands attacked the American Embassy here and burned it to the ground, killing an American Marine and forcing more than a dozen embassy employees to lock themselves inside a vault for hours before police responded to calls for help.

That protest was triggered by erroneous reports that the United States was responsible for fatal shootings at the holiest mosque of the Islamic religion in Saudi Arabia.

Originally published in England, Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” the object of Sunday’s protest, was recently released in the United States. Twice recently, the book has touched off protests at the American center in Lahore, Pakistan, but both demonstrations ended peacefully.

“This thing has been simmering for a couple of months,” Obee said, adding, “I feel a little bit bemused, though, why they went after us rather than the British.”

Although the United States and Pakistan remain close allies, there has long been an undercurrent of anti-Americanism among this country’s fundamentalist political parties, which are variously aligned with Iran and other nations hostile to the United States.

Sunday’s protest was planned by those fundamentalist groups and religious scholars, and the U.S. Embassy had warned all Americans in Islamabad to stay off the streets during the hours of the scheduled protest.