U.s. Embassy, Innocence Of Muslims | featured news

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri said a film made in the United States mocking the Prophet Mohammad showed Washington was waging a "crusader Zionist war" against Muslims and he called for more protests outside American embassies.

Concerned about the reaction to an anti-Muslim film that was gaining attention online, the U.S. intelligence community sent a cable to the embassy in Cairo, Egypt, warning of the concern, a U.S. official told CNN.

Wanis el-Sharef, eastern Libya's deputy interior minister, said Thursday the attacks were suspected to have been timed to mark the 9/11 anniversary and that the militants used protesting civilians as cover. He said an unspecified number of militants suspected of taking part in the attack have been arrested and that others were being closely monitored by police to see whether they are linked to a group.

“Innocence of Muslims” -- the crude and provocative anti-Islam video blamed for a wave of deadly violence against U.S. diplomatic outposts -- was promoted by a small band of anti-Muslim Christian activists, according to reports, but the true identity of its director remained unclear.

Chanting "death to America," hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

The film at the centre of the protests in Libya and Egypt is called Innocence of Muslims and was apparently shot in the US. The full version is said to run for two hours, but so far all most people have seen is a collection of extracts found on Facebook and Youtube - with one trailer running to 14 minutes.