TRIPOLI, Libya: Parliament suspended Libya’s Interior Minister Nasr al-Mabrouk on Saturday after at least 11 people died when his security forces attacked rioters who torched the Italian consulate in Benghazi. Meanwhile in a similar rioting 15 Nigerians were killed on Saturday, police said.

Right-wing Italian Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli resigned under pressure for allegedly fuelling that fury in Benghazi by displaying a T-shirt he wore emblazoned with one of the offending cartoons, first published nearly five months ago in a Danish newspaper. Danish church officials met with a top Muslim cleric in Cairo, meanwhile, but made no significant headway in defusing the conflict.

And in what has become a daily event, tens of thousands of Muslims protested, this time in Britain and Austria, to denounce the blasphemous caricatures.

Seif el-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, issued a statement on Saturday putting the death toll in Benghazi, a Libyan costal city, at 11.

He said four of the dead were believed to have been Egyptians or Palestinians. Thirty-five were wounded. "Setting the consulate on fire was a mistake, but using excessive force was the most tragic response," the younger Gadhafi said, explaining the suspension of Interior Minister Nasr al-Mabrouk.

Gadhafi expressed pride, however, that the demonstrators were behind Calderoli’s resignation when "other Arab states refused or lagged behind in taking revenge for insults to their religion."

Gadhafi said Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi called his father to offer condolences for the deaths and to thank him for protecting Italians who were in the consulate.

Berlusconi blamed the riots in Libya on "thoughtless action by our minister," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as saying.

Calderoli said he wore the T-shirt, which he showed off on state TV on Friday, as his way of showing "solidarity to all those who were hit by the blind violence of religious fanaticism." "But it wasn’t even my intention to offend the Muslim religion nor to be the pretext for yesterday’s violence," he said in a statement.

Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, met in Cairo on Saturday with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University and both religious leaders denounced violent protests but failed to agree on a way to end the boiling crisis. Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologise for the drawings that first appeared in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in September.

In Nigeria rioters killed at least 15 people on Saturday after Muslims protest against the publication of blasphemous sketches descended into violence, a police spokesman said.

Witnesses told AFP that protesters turned on the Christian minority in the northern city of Maiduguri, burning shops and churches, after police dispersed a rally called to condemn European newspapers that printed the caricatures.

In London more than 15,000 people joined an angry but peaceful protest in central London on Saturday against the blasphemous cartoons that have infuriated many in the Muslim world.

Buses brought participants from cities around Britain to gather in Trafalgar Square, and they later marched through central London to Hyde Park, from where the crowd began dispersing late in the afternoon.

"Free speech — cheap insults," read some placards. "How dare you insult the blessed Prophet Muhammad (SAW)?" asked another. Speakers shouted from the podium and the crowd yelled back as the demonstration grew increasingly angry.

In New York waving signs and praying, hundreds of Muslims demonstrated peacefully near the Danish consulate to protest blasphemous sketches.

The crowd, which news reports estimated ranged from the hundreds to more than 1,000, gathered on Friday at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across from the United Nations in Manhattan. News reports said representatives of Muslim groups met with Danish consulate officials during the protest.