At least two protesters have been killed during demonstrations in Senegal demanding the departure of the country's 85-year-old president.
Tension is running high in the usually peaceful country, six days ahead of presidential polls in which President Abdoulaye Wade is seeking a controversial third term in office which the opposition says is unconstitutional.
Protesters have erected barricades and clashed with police in the capital in Dakar in six days of violence.
Mr Wade has insisted on running again, despite the deepening unrest and calls from both France and the United States to hand power to the next generation.
Voters are due to go to the polls on February 26.
Six people are thought to have died since the protests began in January.
On Sunday, the state-owned news service confirmed the death of a young man in a suburb of the capital where the demonstrations later spread.
The clashes marked a worrying development, because they took on a religious dimension in this normally tolerant Muslim nation.
Hundreds had gathered outside a mosque as religious leaders met to discuss a Friday incident in which police used grenade launchers to throw tear gas down the wide boulevard, at one point hitting the wall of the mosque.
Footage of the incident shown on television indicated that police had not shot inside the mosque, only outside where a crowd had gathered. But the cloud of gas enveloped worshippers praying both inside and outside the shrine, deeply offending Senegal's largest Muslim brotherhood, which owns the mosque.
On Sunday morning crowds gathered outside the mosque and began throwing projectiles at police who responded with waves of tear gas.
Each time the youths charged the police, they screamed, "Allah Akbar" and "There is no God but Allah", religious phrases that are rarely heard in a nation that is over 90% Muslim but which has long embraced a secular identity.
"I'm worried - yes. What I'm seeing here could really degenerate into another kind of situation, a religious one," said Moustapha Faye, a young member of the Mouride Muslim brotherhood, the second largest in Senegal, as he stood behind the police line watching the confrontation.
"We must absolutely avoid violence."
Later on Sunday, interior minister Ousmane Ngom apologised to the population, calling Friday's attack on the mosque a "police blunder".
He asked for forgiveness from the Tidiane community and all Muslims and called on politicians not to try to exploit the incident.
Senegal has seen protests every few days since January, when the country's highest court ruled that Mr Wade was eligible to run for a third term.
The leader has been dismissive of the opposition, characterising protests as nothing more than a "light breeze which rustles the leaves of a tree, but never becomes a hurricane".
The country is considered key to the stability of West Africa.
It is the only nation in the region - and one of the only in Africa - that has never experienced a military coup.
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