YEMENI PROTESTERS STORM US EMBASSY IN SANAA

Hundreds of Yemeni demonstrators stormed the US embassy in Sanaa yesterday in protest at a film they consider blasphemous to Islam, and security guards tried to hold them off by firing into the air.

The attack followed Tuesday night's storming of the United States Consulate in Benghazi, where the ambassador and three other staff were killed. President Barack Obama said the perpetrators would be tracked down and ordered two destroyers to the Libyan coast, but there were fears protests would spread to other countries in the Muslim world.

Young demonstrators shouting 'we redeem, Messenger of God' smashed windows of the security offices outside the embassy with stones and burned cars before breaking through the main gate of the heavily fortified compound in eastern Sanaa. Others held aloft banners declaring 'Allah is Greatest'. Tyres blazed outside the compound and protesters scaled the walls.

Meanwhile US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that US government had nothing to do with the movie that sparked violence in Muslim countries.

The film, apparently produced in the United States, sparked an attack on a US mission in Libya on Tuesday that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. Clips posted on the Internet show an amateurish production portraying the Prophet Mohammad as a womanizer, a homosexual and a child abuser.

'The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message,' Clinton said at the start of talks with senior Moroccan officials in Washington.'To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.'