[JURIST] Western businesses burned and three people were killed Wednesday as Pakistanis took to the streets in a third day of protests over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad [JURIST news archive]. A man was shot dead in Lahore as violent clashes with police erupted during a rally of 1,500 students outside a university. In Peshawar near the Afghanistan border, 70,000 demonstrators gathered, burning a KFC restaurant and three movie theaters and looting the offices of a Norwegian mobile phone company while battling police armed with batons.

Though protests around Asia and the Middle East over the cartoons - which first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten [media website] in September and have been reprinted [Le Monde slide show] in several major European papers - have subsided in recent days, violent demonstrations have increased in Pakistan this week [JURIST report]. AP has more.