Despite the Egyptian government's call for calm, a few dozen protesters have showed up for a second night outside the US embassy in Cairo.

The unrest continued early on Thursday morning, as the fallout from a film ridiculing Islam's prophet raged on.

Dozens of police officers were deployed, as protesters chanted in the streets and fires burned. Some demonstrators were engulfed in tear gas.

Innocence of Muslims, the film that mocked Muhammad (SAW) , was allegedly produced in the US by a filmmaker with ties to Coptic Christian groups, and excerpted on YouTube with dubbing in Arabic.

On Wednesday, some 200 demonstrators took part in protests in the Egyptian capital.

They rallied into the night chanting "leave Egypt" but there was however no repeat of the previous day's events when angry crowds climbed the walls of the complex and tore down an American flag, which they replaced briefly with a black, Islamist flag.

Spreading protests

The prosecutor-general said on Wednesday that four people are being questioned after Tuesday's events.

Nine Coptic Egyptian-Americans were also put on an airport watch list. They are believed to have contributed to the production of the anti-Islam film that led to the embassy protest.

The man behind the protests told Al Jazeera he just wants to combat insults against Islam through legal and peaceful means. Wesam Abdel Wareth, the protest organizer, said his group was not happy that young people who joined their protest brought down the US flag.

He also said there was no co-ordination with protesters in Libya, and he condemned the violence there.

On Tuesday, Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar mosque and seat of Sunni learning condemned a symbolic "trial" of the Prophet organized by a US group including Terry Jones, a Christian pastor who triggered riots in Afghanistan in 2010 by threatening to burn the Koran.

But it was not immediately clear whether the event sponsored by Jones also prompted the embassy events.

Whatever the cause, the events appeared to underscore how much the ground in the Middle East has shifted for Washington, which for decades had close ties with Arab dictators who could be counted on to muzzle dissent.

US President Barack Obama's administration in recent weeks had appeared to overcome some of its initial caution following the election of an Islamist Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, offering his government desperately needed debt relief and backing for international loans.

Egypt is neither an ally nor an enemy of the United States, Obama said on Wednesday.

"I don't think that we would consider them an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy," Obama said in excerpts of an interview with Telemundo aired by MSNBC.

PHOTO CAPTION

Egyptian soldiers stand guard in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012.

Aljazeera