Pakistan has lifted ban on popular website YouTube a few days after it was blocked for containing blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Mohammad.
Officials however, said hundreds of pages of the website will remain blocked for containing blasphemous matter.
A spokesman for Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) confirmed that the blanket ban had been lifted on YouTube.
Internet users in Pakistan are now able to access YouTube for the first time since the entire website was banned on last Thursday in the wake of public outrage about caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that first appeared on Facebook.
Several thousand Pakistanis took to the streets at the behest of religious groups to protest, but demonstrations have been peaceful.
A Pakistani court on May 19 ordered a block on Facebook until May 31, implemented by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), which then banned YouTube and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia. Islamic activists and students took to the streets, shouting “Death to Facebook”, “Death to America” and burnt US flags, venting anger over what the PTA called “growing sacrilegious” online content.
YouTube, which is Google-owned, had said it was working to ensure the service was restored, although Google chief executive Eric Schmidt suspected that suppressing political criticism had been a factor behind the ban.
But late on Wednesday, the regulatory authority in Pakistan said that YouTube — which together with Facebook accounts for up to 25 per cent of Internet traffic in the country — was back up, although restricted. “YouTube has been unblocked, but the links to sacrilegious content would remain inaccessible in Pakistan,” PTA spokesman Khurram Mehran said. “Th-ere are around 1,200 URLs which have been blocked. These are not websites but links,” he added on Thursday. “Only links containing objectionable material have been blocked.
More than half of these links were reported by the public,” Mr Mehran said. Interior minister Rehman Malik said on Wednesday that pages containing blasphemous material would remain blocked.