At least four people have been killed and up to 20 injured in a violent protest in Afghanistan over cartoons satirising the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
Police shot into a crowd of rioters in the town of Qalat as they tried to march on a nearby US military base.
It brings to 12 the number of people killed in Afghan protests over the cartoons in recent days.
Afghanistan's top religious body is urging an end to the rioting, saying the cartoons do not justify violence.
"We condemn violence anywhere. If a non-Muslim country has mistaken or insulted Islam we should talk to them peacefully," Ulema Council member Mawli Osmani Haqtalab told the BBC.
'Provocation'
The latest deaths came as a French magazine became the latest publication to carry the controversial caricatures.
The magazine, Charlie Hebdo, won the backing of a French court on Tuesday, after several Islamic organisations had complained that publication would amount to an insult to their religion.
CARTOON ROW
The magazine features all 12 cartoons of Muhammad that originally appeared in a Danish paper last year - including one that shows Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban.
Religions other than Islam are caricatured as well.
Several religious groups had tried to block the cartoons' publication, but the injunction failed on a technicality.
French President Jacques Chirac criticised newspapers for reprinting the caricatures, saying freedom of expression must be used responsibly.
"I condemn all manifest provocation that might dangerously fan passions," he told his cabinet, according to a government spokesman.
The president of the French Muslim Council has appealed for calm and warned people not to be provoked, but several of the magazine's managers have been given police protection as a precaution.
The BBC's Alasdair Sandford in Paris says the newsagents he visited had the magazine discreetly turned face down.
In other developments:
Afghanistan's top council of Muslim clerics made its call for peace as violence raged in the southern town of Qalat.
At least 400 people joined the latest protest, some of them burning vehicles and hurling stones at police who tried to block their way to a US military base, local police chief Abdul Bari said.
Police initially responded by firing into the air, but were forced to then fire into the crowd, Mr Bari said.
As well as demonstrators injured by gunfire, a number of Afghan soldiers and police were hurt by flying stones.
The police chief of Zabul province, Nasim Mullah Khel, told the BBC the demonstration had turned violent at the instigation of foreign construction workers from Pakistan and that some of the demonstrators had weapons.
However, one demonstrator told the BBC the group had been unarmed.
^ Back to top | BBC Sport Home | BBC Homepage | Contact us | Help | ©