The protests in several major cities came at the same time as a paralysing nationwide strike called by a coalition of key Islamic parties to protest controversial cartoons of Prophet Hazrat Mohammed (SM).

In Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city, police fired teargas to disperse around 1,000 stone-throwing Shiite Muslim protesters chanting "The nation wants the head of Bush" as they tried to reach the US consulate, an AFP correspondent said.

A suicide car bomb attack outside the consulate on Thursday killed a US diplomat and three others, further heightening security fears ahead of Bush's maiden trip to Pakistan.

"The organisers had assured us that they would not go to the US consulate but they violated the agreement and we had resorted to teargas to stop them," police officer Majeed Khan said.

The protest was organised by the Shiite youth wing, Imamia Students Organisation.

Riot police blocked the road leading to the consulate and chased protesters into the narrow lanes of the nearby commercial district, where shops were already shut because of the strike. Several demonstrators were arrested.

Earlier police baton-charged around 200 Shiite protesters shouting "Killer Bush, go home" outside a mosque in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.

"They wanted to block the main road and we baton-charged them to disperse them when they defied the order to move," senior police officer Mohammad Basharat told AFP, adding that several people had been arrested.