Afghan protesters set fire to a U.S. flag as they shout slogans during a demonstration in Kabul, September 21, 2012. Hundreds of Afghans protested against a U.S.-made film they say insults the Prophet Mohammad. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

In France, where the publication of cartoons denigrating the Prophet stoked anger over an anti-Islam video made in California, the authorities banned all protests over the issue.

"There will be strictly no exceptions. Demonstrations will be banned and broken up," said Interior Minister Manuel Valls.

Tunisia's Islamist-led government also banned protests against the images published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Four people were killed and almost 30 wounded last week when the U.S.embassy was stormed in a protest over the film.

Many Western and Muslim politicians and clerics have appealed for calm, denouncing those behind the mockery of the Prophet, but also condemning violent reactions to it.

At street level, Muslims enraged by attacks on their faith spoke of a culture war with those in the West who put rights to freedom of expression above any religious offence caused.

"They hate him (the Prophet Mohammad) and show this through their continued works in the West, through their writings, cartoons, films and the way they launch war against him in schools," said Abdessalam Abdullah, a preacher at a mosque in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh.

Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet blasphemous.

Western diplomatic missions in Muslim nations tightened security ahead of Friday prayers. France ordered its embassies, schools and cultural centers to shut in a score of countries.

"CUT HIM IN PIECES"

In Pakistan, tens of thousands of people joined protests encouraged by the government in several cities including Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore, Multan and Muzaffarabad.

The bloodiest unrest erupted in the southern city of Karachi, where 10 people were killed, including three policemen, and more than 100 wounded, according to Allah Bachayo Memon, spokesman of the chief minister of Sindh province. He said about 20 vehicles, three banks and five cinemas were set on fire.

Crowds set two cinemas ablaze and ransacked shops in the northwestern city of Peshawar, clashing with riot police who fired tear gas. At least five people were killed.

In Mardan in the northwest, police said a Christian church was set on fire and several people hurt.

Mohammed Tariq Khan, a protester in Islamabad, said: "Our demand is that whoever has blasphemed against our holy Prophet should be handed over to us so we can cut him up into tiny pieces in front of the entire nation."

Security forces fired in the air in Peshawar and the eastern city of Lahore to keep protesters away from U.S. consulates. Police fired tear gas at about 1,000 protesters in Islamabad.

The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has run television spots, one featuring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying the government had nothing to do with the film about Mohammad.

Pakistan declared Friday a "Day of Love" for the Prophet and Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said an attack on Islam's founder was "an attack on the whole 1.5 billion Muslims".

The foreign ministry summoned the U.S. chargé d'affaires to lodge a protest over the video posted on YouTube, the latest in an array of irritants poisoning U.S.-Pakistani relations.

In neighboring Afghanistan, police contacted religious and community leaders to try to prevent bloodshed. Protests in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif only attracted a few hundred people and no violence was reported, but a cleric told one crowd: "If you kill Americans, it's legal and allowable."

About 10,000 Islamists gathered in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, after Friday prayers, chanting slogans and burning U.S. and French flags and an effigy of U.S. President Barack Obama.

PEACEFUL PROTESTS

Protests went off peacefully in the Arab world, where last week several embassies were attacked and the U.S. envoy to Libya was killed in an initial burst of unrest over the film.

A few dozen Egyptians protested near the French embassy in Cairo, but were kept away from the premises by police deployed in large numbers to avoid a repeat of violence at the U.S. embassy last week.

Mainstream Islamic leaders in Egypt, where Islamist parties have moved to the heart of governmentsince Hosni Mubarak was toppled, have expressed outrage, but urged a peaceful response.

In remarks to Reuters, the leader of the Nour Party, one of the biggest ultraorthodox Islamist parties in Egypt, echoed calls for the criminalization of insults to religions including Islam. But he said it was important to separate between an offender and an entire society.

"The reasonable people in the West outnumber the thoughtless," said Emad Abdel Ghafour. "Contact should be kept up with the reasonable people," he added. "It is unreasonable that reactions come through arson and killing. We all suffer and are affected by these acts," he said.

In Yemen, where the U.S. embassy was stormed last week, several hundred Shi'ite protesters chanted anti-American slogans, but riot police blocked the route to the embassy.

Anger over the film brought several thousand Shi'ites and Sunnis together in a rare show of sectarian unity in Iraq's southern city of Basra, where they burnt U.S. and Israeli flags.

Lebanon's Hezbollah-run al-Manar television showed thousands of people waving Lebanese and yellow Hezbollah flags as they marched past the Roman ruins of Baalbek and shouted slogans such as "Death to America, death to those who insult the Prophet".

The violence provoked by the film has led to a total of about 30 deaths so far, a United Nations official said.

"Both the film and the cartoons are malicious and deliberately provocative. The film particularly portrays a disgracefully distorted image of Muslims," Rupert Colville, spokesman for U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, told a news briefing in Geneva.

He said Pillay upheld people's right to protest peacefully, but saw no justification for violent and destructive reactions.

"In the case of Charlie Hebdo, given that they knew perfectly what happened in response to the film last week, it seems doubly irresponsible on their part to have published these cartoons," Colville said of the French magazine.

(Writing by Alistair Lyon; Reporting by bureaux in Asia, the Middle East and France editing by Andrew Roche)

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Pakistani protestors gather as police fire tear gas to disperse them during clashes that erupted as protestors tried to approach the U.S. embassy, Friday, Sept. 21, 2012 in Islamabad, Pakistan. Protests by tens of thousands of Pakistanis infuriated by an anti-Islam film descended into deadly violence on Friday, with police firing tear gas and live ammunition in an attempt to subdue rioters who hurled rocks and set fire to buildings in some cities. Four people were killed and dozens injured on a holiday declared by Pakistan's government so people could rally against the video. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

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PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Protests over an anti-Muslim film turned violent Friday across Pakistan, with police firing tear gas and live ammunition at thousands of demonstrators who threw rocks and set fire to buildings. At least 17 people were killed and dozens were injured.

Muslims also marched in at least a half-dozen other countries, with some burning American flags and effigies of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Pakistan has experienced nearly a week of deadly protests over the film, "Innocence of Muslims," that has sparked anti-American violence around the Islamic world since it attracted attention on the Internet in the past 10 days. The deaths of at least 47 people, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, have been linked to the violence over the film, which was made in California and denigrates the Prophet Muhammad.

The Pakistani government declared Friday to be a national holiday — "Love for the Prophet Day" — and encouraged peaceful protests.

The U.S. Embassy spent $70,000 for advertisements on Pakistani TV that featured Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the video. Their comments, from previous public events in Washington, were in English but subtitled in Urdu, the main Pakistani language.

The deadliest violence occurred in the southern port city of Karachi, where 12 people were killed and 82 wounded, according to Seemi Jamali and Aftab Channar, officials at two hospitals.

Armed demonstrators among a crowd of 15,000 in that city fired on police, according to police officer Ahmad Hassan. The crowd also burned two cinemas and a bank, he said.

Five people were killed and 60 wounded in the northwestern city of Peshawar, said police official Bashir Khan. Police fired on rioters who set fire to three movie theaters and the city's chamber of commerce, and damaged shops and vehicles.

One of the dead was identified as Mohammad Amir, a driver for a Pakistani TV station who was killed when police bullets hit his vehicle, which was parked near one of the cinemas, said Kashif Mahmood, a reporter for ARY TV who also was in the car. The TV channel showed doctors at a hospital trying unsuccessfully to save Amir's life.

Police beat demonstrators with batons and launched volleys of tear gas. Later in the day, tens of thousands of protesters converged in a neighborhood and called for the maker of the film, an American citizen originally from Egypt, to be executed.

Police and stone-throwers also clashed in Lahore and Islamabad, the capital. Police fired tear gas and warning shots to try to keep them from advancing toward U.S. missions in the cities.

Hospital official Mohammad Naeem says 45 people were wounded in Islamabad, including 28 protesters and 17 police.

Police clashed with over 10,000 demonstrators in several neighborhoods in the capital, including in front of a five-star hotel near the diplomatic enclave where the U.S. Embassy and other foreign missions are located. A military helicopter buzzed overhead as the sound of tear gas being fired echoed across the city.

The government temporarily blocked cellphone service in 15 major cities to prevent militants from using phones to detonate bombs during the protests, said an Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Blocking cellphones could make it harder for people to organize protests as well.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry on Friday summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires in Islamabad, Richard Hoagland, over the film. Pakistan has banned access to YouTube because the website refused to remove the video.

Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf urged the international community to pass laws to prevent people from insulting the prophet.

"If denying the Holocaust is a crime, then is it not fair and legitimate for a Muslim to demand that denigrating and demeaning Islam's holiest personality is no less than a crime?" Ashraf said in a speech to religious scholars and international diplomats in Islamabad.

Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, but not in the U.S.

U.S. officials have tried to explain to the Muslim world how they strongly disagree with the anti-Islam film but have no ability to block it because of free speech guarantees.

In Iraq, about 3,000 protesters condemned the film and caricatures of the prophet that were published in a French satirical weekly. The protest in the southern city of Basra was organized by Iranian-backed Shiite groups. Some protesters raised Iraqi flags and posters of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while chanting: "Death to America."

Protesters burned Israeli and U.S. flags and raised a banner that read: "We condemn the offenses made against the prophet."

In the Sri Lanka capital of Colombo, about 2,000 Muslims burned effigies of Obama and U.S. flags at a protest after Friday prayers, demanding that the United States ban the film. In Bangladesh, more than 2,000 people marched in the capital, Dhaka, and burned a makeshift coffin draped in an American flag and an effigy of Obama.

They also burned a French flag to protest the publication of the caricatures of the prophet. Small and mostly orderly protests were also held in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thousands gathered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley for the latest in a series of rallies organized by the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. Protesters carried the yellow Hezbollah flag.

Hezbollah appeared to be trying to ensure the gatherings don't become violent, planning them only in areas where Hezbollah has control. None of the rallies targets the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in the hills outside Beirut.

Police clamped a daylong curfew in parts of Indian-controlled Kashmir's main city, Srinagar, and chased away protesters opposing the anti-Islam film. Authorities in the region also temporarily blocked cellphone and Internet services to prevent viewing the film clips.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also lashed out at the West over the film and the caricatures in the French weekly, Charlie Hebdo.

"In return for (allowing) the ugliest insults to the divine messenger, they — the West — raise the slogan of respect for freedom of speech," Ahmadinejad said at a speech in Tehran.

He said this explanation was "clearly a deception."

In Germany, the Interior Ministry said it was postponing a poster campaign aimed at countering radical Islam among young people due to tensions caused by the online video insulting Islam. It said posters for the campaign — in German, Turkish and Arabic — were meant to go on display Friday in German cities with large immigrant populations but are being withheld because of the changed security situation. Germany is home to an estimated 4 million Muslims.

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Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed, Zarar Khan and Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad; Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran; and Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India, contributed to this report.