Pakistan’s ambassador to Denmark has been called back to Islamabad ”for consultations” amid a continuing row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the foreign office said on Friday.
The move comes shortly after officials said that Denmark, where the drawings were first published in September, had temporarily closed its embassy in Islamabad.
”Pakistan’s ambassador in Copenhagen, Mr Javed A Qureshi, has been called to Islamabad for consultations over the cartoon controversy,” foreign ministry spokesperson Tasnim Aslam said.
Government sources said the decision was made during a meeting between top Pakistani foreign ministry officials and the Danish ambassador in Islamabad, Bent Wigotski, at the ministry on Friday.
Aslam said she was not aware that the Denmark embassy had shut.
”They have not informed us,” she said.
Demark said on Friday its embassy staff will remain in Pakistan after the temporary closure of its mission in Islamabad amid violent protests over the cartoons.
”We decided on Friday to shut our embassy for security reasons, because we believe it is not responsible to keep it open at the moment,” Lars Thuesen, head of the Danish foreign ministry’s crisis centre, said.
”The ambassador and his staff will remain in the country, but not in the embassy. Diplomatic relations have not been severed,” he said.
A recorded message told callers to the embassy’s telephone number on Friday that ”the embassy is temporarily closed until further notice”.
Five Pakistanis have died this week in demonstrations sparked by the cartoons, which were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
Danish authorities ”will wait and see how the situation in Pakistan evolves in coming days”, Thuesen said, adding that a decision on a possible reopening of the embassy could be taken on Monday.
Denmark has already temporarily closed its embassies in Tehran, Damascus and Jakarta and its consulates in Beirut and Tunis.
Protests
Further cartoon protests erupted in Pakistan on Friday. Also, about 200 Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank city of Hebron demonstrated against the publication of the cartoons as they were leaving Friday prayers.
The protesters gathered outside the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site holy for both Jews and Muslims, and shouted slogans against Denmark. The crowd then threw stones at a nearby Israeli army roadblock, where troops responded by firing warning shots.
There were no casualties in the incident and calm was quickly restored.
Police barred Muslims under the age of 45 from Friday prayers in the flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, fearing similar disturbances.
Earlier, Muslim worshippers in the village of Nabi Elias, near the northern West Bank town of Qalqiliya, found slurs against Muhammad sprayed on the walls of a mosque. An Israeli officer said he suspected hard-line Jewish settlers were behind the graffiti.
Tensions have remained high in the Palestinian territories, where Muslims have joined worldwide protests against the cartoons, attacking European and Danish targets.
Iran
Meanwhile, scores of demonstrators from Iran’s Sunni Muslim minority burned a makeshift cross outside the Danish embassy in Tehran on Friday in a new protest over the publication of the cartoons.
The protesters, who an Agence France-Presse photographer said numbered about 150, carried placards reading ”God is greatest”, and chanted ”Death to Denmark”.
But there was no repetition of the violence that saw the embassy compound pelted with stones, firecrackers and Molotov cocktails during previous protests.
Danish right-wing daily Jyllands-Posten first published the 12 cartoons in September last year, and they have since been republished in a string of other newspapers, mainly in Europe. — AFP
