US confirms protesters breached Cairo embassy wall

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A group of protesters scaled the wall at the US embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and tore down the Stars and Stripes, a US State Department official confirmed.

"We had some people breach the wall, take the flag down and replace it," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, adding that so far there had not been any reports of injuries.

"What I heard was that it was replaced with a... plain black flag. But I may not be correct in that," she added, asked if it was an Al-Qaeda flag.

An AFP photographer in Cairo reported that nearly 3,000 demonstrators, most of them hardline Islamist supporters of the Salafist movement or football fans, had gathered at the embassy to protest a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Mohammed.

"We are obviously working with Egyptian security to try to restore order at the embassy, and to work with them to try to get the situation under control," Nuland told journalists at the State Department.

She added "it sounds like, and I don't have full details, that this came up pretty quickly, (a) relatively modest group of people, but caught both us and the Egyptian security outside the embassy by surprise."

The film was apparently was produced by expatriate members of Egypt's Christian minority resident in the United States.