US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, said: “We are taking aggressive steps to protect” diplomatic missions worldwide.
Among those killed so far have been four US diplomatic staff in Libya, including ambassador Chris Stevens, who died when militants laid siege to the US mission in Benghazi on September 11 in a four-hour attack.
Clinton said the FBI had launched an investigation inside Libya, and she vowed that “we will not rest until the people who orchestrated this attack are found and punished”.
In the deadliest single attack linked to the film, a female suicide bomber killed 12 people in Afghanistan on Tuesday, and fresh protests erupted there on Wednesday with about 1,000 people blocking a key road to Kabul
“The bombing was in retaliation for the insult to our Prophet,” Zubair Sidiqi, spokesman for Hezb-i-Islami, the second largest insurgent group after the Taliban, told AFP.
Security officials said eight South Africans were among those killed on a highway leading to Kabul airport when the bomber blew up her station wagon alongside a minivan carrying foreign workers.
Taliban fighters last week stormed a British-run airfield, killing two US Marines and destroying six US fighter jets in another act of vengeance.
In Lebanon, the head of the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah, listed in the United States as a terrorist organisation, made a rare public appearance Monday to warn of “very dangerous” repercussions if the entire film is released, rather than the 14-minute trailer that has already sparked outrage.
Al-Qaeda’s franchise in North Africa urged Muslims to storm US embassies and kill American envoys in Muslim countries, monitoring group IntelCenter said.
The film-maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Egyptian Copt and fraudster who was sentenced to 21 months in prison in the United States in June 2010, not been seen since Saturday when he was questioned.
The risks now facing those involved in the film were underlined when a Salafist cleric in Egypt called Monday for the deaths of all those involved in its making.
On Monday, officers from the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department escorted four members of Nakoula’s family to join him in hiding.
Egypt’s public prosecutor has ordered that seven US-based Egyptian Copts be tried over their role in the film, accusing them of “insulting the Islamic religion, insulting the Prophet and inciting sectarian strife.”
Egypt’s public prosecutor has ordered that seven US-based Egyptian Copts be tried over their role in the film, accusing them of “insulting the Islamic religion, insulting the Prophet and inciting sectarian strife.”
However Interpol said it was not aware of any request from Egypt for the arrest of people related to the film but stressed that its charter “forbids it from undertaking any matter of a predominantly political, military, religious or racial nature”.
In Pakistan, two protesters died after demonstrating against the film close to the Afghan border and outside the US consulate in Karachi.
Police used tear gas to disperse more than 2,000 protesters trying to reach the US consulate in the city of Peshawar, chanting anti-US slogans and burning the Stars and Stripes flag.
Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan blocked access to YouTube, following the video-sharing website’s failure to take down the clip of the film. Saudi Arabia and Russia indicated they may follow suit.
In east Jerusalem hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli border police, hurling stones and firebombs at a checkpoint.
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