NEW YORK, Feb 7: Over 25 demonstrators protested at the offices of Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday after it became the first major American newspaper to reproduce one of the blasphemous caricatures.

The protesters carried banners reading ‘No to Hate’ and ‘Peaceful Protest for Religious Tolerance’. They dispersed after about an hour. The organisers said they would hold another demonstration on Friday unless they received an apology.

The newspaper published the caricature in its Saturday editions. A small New York paper, The New York Sun, also carried the caricatures in its Thursday editions.

Amanda Bennett, the editor of the Inquirer, said the decision to publish one cartoon came after several days of internal deliberation. The editors drew on the newspaper’s history of publishing stark images that some readers found offensive, she said. She cited the instance of a grisly photograph of civilian contractors burned to death in Falluja, Iraq, in March 2004, the New York Times said on Tuesday.

When it became clear that the caricatures were becoming ‘more, not less, Newsworthy’, Ms Bennett told the Times, the editors decided to publish the cartoon so that readers were better informed about the controversy.

“There’s been a whole history of newspapers publishing things that people would find controversial and offensive,” Ms Bennett said. “My view is that we need to publish it for a good news reason. We need to publish in context and we need to explain to readers why we did it.”

Other major American newspapers have not yet published the caricatures.