8.49am BST

Welcome to Middle East Live where we will continue to focus on the aftermath of Tuesday's attack on the US consulate in Benghazi and continuing protests in Cairo over an anti-Islamic film.

Here's a round up of the latest developments:

Libya and US response to consulate attack

• Barack Obama has vowed to hunt down the killers of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans during an assault on its mission in Benghazi as suspicion grew that the diplomat was the victim of an organised attack by an Islamist group. "Make no mistake: justice will be done," Obama said at the White House. The FBI is being dispatched to Libya to help with the hunt, as well as 50 marines to reinforce the Tripoli embassy. Two US warships were reportedly heading towards the Libyan coast on Wednesday night. US surveillance drones are being redeployed to search for suspects among alleged jihadist camps in eastern Libya.

• The assault was a planned terrorist attack which used protests against an anti-Islamic film as cover, according to CNN's sources. The fact that a rocket-propelled grenade was used is cited as evidence.

Sources tracking militant Islamist groups in eastern Libya say a pro-al Qaida group responsible for a previous armed assault on the Benghazi consulate is the chief suspect. A senior defence official told CNN the drones would be part of "a stepped-up, more focused search" for a particular insurgent cell that may have been behind the killings.

• There are competing theories among US officials about whether the attack was timed to coincide with 9/11 or whether it was opportunistic, writes Chris McGreal in Washington.

Some officials drew attention to the scale of the assault, ostensibly over an anti-Muslim film, compared to an earlier protest in Cairo. [But] senior administration officials also said they believe that the consulate building, which was burned and looted, was the intended target, and that Stevens was an accidental victim. The attackers are unlikely to have known the ambassador was visiting from Tripoli.

• Barack Obama has stepped into the political row over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's ill-judged response to the Benghazi consulate attack. Romney faced heavy criticism from across the political spectrum for statements issued on Tuesday evening and repeated at a press conference on Wednesday morning in which he accused the Obama administration of being too ready to apologise for American values.

• Chris Stevens was in many ways the model American diplomat, committed, idealistic, and willing to take risks, according to the LA Times.

Stevens had a yearning to mingle with Arabs to get a street level view of events, and he sometimes chafed about the post-September 11 security measures that sometimes prevented diplomats from reaching far into the hinterland.

Anti-Islamic film

• The hunt for the maker of the anti-Islamic video that inflamed mayhem in Egypt and Libya has led to a Californian Coptic Christian convicted of financial crimes. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, who lives outside Los Angeles, confirmed he managed and provided logistics for The Innocence of Muslims and that he considered Islam a cancer and that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video's purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula's address.

• The anti-Islamic film which was initially thought to have sparked the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi has caused uproar across the Muslim world. Protesters took to the streets in some countries, US citizens were warned to keep a low profile and public condemnations of the film were issued.

Egypt

• A second night of protest against the film turned violent in Cairo as clashes erupted between demonstrators and police in the early hours of Thursday in Tahrir Square, the Egypt Independent reports.

Police vehicles fired teargas at protesters who were banging stones on metal to make noise. Stones were hurled from both sides. An anonymous protester said he demands that the US ambassador to Egypt be expelled and measures against the screening of the film to be taken.

• President Mohamed Morsi called on the Egyptian embassy in Washington to take legal action against the producers of the “Innocence of Muslims” film. His statement came nearly a full day after the first attack took place.

• The tepid response from the Egyptian government to the first assault gave officials in Washington — already troubled by the direction of President Mohamed Morsi’s new Islamist government — further cause for concern, according to the New York Times. Several foreign policy experts said they worried that Morsi was putting appeasement of his country’s Islamist population ahead of national security, it said.