The US ambassador to Libya and three other embassy
staff have been reported killed by an armed Islamist mob that stormed and set
fire to the United States consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
An armed man waves his rifle as buildings and cars are
engulfed in flames after being set on fire inside the US consulate compound in
Benghazi Photo: AFP/Getty Images
The death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens,
was reported by Reuters, who had spoken to a Libyan official. It had not been
confirmed.
It was not clear if the ambassador was in his car or
the Libyan consulate when the attack occurred.
"The Libyan ambassador and three staff members
were killed when gunmen fired rockets at them," the official in Benghazi
told Reuters.
The attack happened on Tuesday night, which was the
11th anniversary of 9/11.
It followed another earlier in the day on the American
embassy in Cairo, in which no-one was injured but the flag was taken down and
torn up and replaced with the black flag used by radical Islamists.
The violence was condemned by Hillary Clinton, the US
secretary of state, who confirmed the death of a State Department official.
"We are heartbroken by this terrible loss," she said. She said that
in light of the attacks the US would be stepping up protection of "our personnel,
our missions, and American citizens worldwide".
The mobs involved in both embassy attacks were mainly
comprised of Salafis, followers of an ultra-traditionalist approach to Islam
that has spread across North Africa as well as much of the rest of the Arab
world from Saudi Arabia in recent years.
Although they were not the prime movers in the
"Arab Spring" protests, they have become much more visible in
countries like Libya where secular dictators have been overthrown.
They are incensed by a film made in America and
promoted on Youtube entitled "The Innocence of Muslims" that is
intended to expose the "hypocrisy" of Islam. It not only portrays the
Prophet, which the religion prohibits, but ridicules him as a homosexual and
advocate of paedophilia, and shows him having sex.
It was apparently made by an Israeli-American
businessman and backed by Terry Jones, the fundamentalist pastor who previously
threatened to hold public burnings of the Koran. A version of the film, which
is in English, has been dubbed into Egyptian Arabic and shown on the website of
an Egyptian Coptic Christian businessman based in America.
In Cairo, the protests started on Tuesday afternoon,
with hundreds of Salafists attacking and some climbing the fortress-like walls
of the embassy. They did not enter the building itself, but one man managed to
bring down the Stars and Stripes flag and replace it with a black flag with the
Islamic inscription "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His
Prophet".
That flag has become associated with Salafism, though
other Islamist groups have used it in the Arab Spring.
The attack in Benghazi, which last year was the
launch-pad of the revolution which overthrew Col Muammar Gaddafi and is a seat
of Islamist politics in Libya, took place later in the evening.
The mob there was armed and sprayed the Libyan security
forces defending the building with gunfire, and even shot rocket-propelled
grenades. Overwhelming the defences, they then proceeded to hurl small
home-made bombs at the buildings, loot it and then set it on fire.
But Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate,
said: ""I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions
in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in
Benghazi.
"It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's
first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to
sympathize with those who waged the attacks.Credit: CKN
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