Rioting Serbs torch US embassy, loot downtown Belgrade (1st Lead)

Feb 21, 2008, 20:49 GMT

Belgrade - Some 200,000 Serbs gathered in Belgrade Thursday to rally against Kosovo's independence and the supportive West, with the demonstration turning into an orgy of vandalism and robbery.

Several groups numbering in the hundreds - described locally as hooligans - set the United States embassy ablaze, after penetrating it and defacing it. The few police on the scene initially withdrew from the mob.

Riot police appeared too late to chase the crowd away, firing teargas as the retreating mob overturned garbage containers and concrete flowerbeds. Witnesses said that several men lay face-down on the pavement, hands cuffed behind their backs.

Upon arrival at the scene, firefighters had first doused a burning booth in front of the smashed consular section of the embassy, which spreads over several buildings along half a block. Firemen eventually also quenched the blaze on the ground and first floor.

The Croatian embassy was also ransacked, reports said, while Turkish, Bosnian, German and Canadian missions, all lined up or near Kneza Milosa, one of the longest Belgrade streets, were pelted with rocks, their windows smashed.

Across the Sava River, in the sprawling New Belgrade, a cordon of riot police protected the mega-store of the Slovenian retailer Mercator and the nearby B92 media building

In the posh downtown Kneza Mihajla and Terazije streets, the mob smashed storefronts and emptied Benetton, Bata, Levi's and other stores. McDonald's restaurants were attacked for the third time since Monday.

Violence exploded while the majority of the people who attended the rally listened to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's appeal for calm or walked to a nearby church for prayer.

But he also whipped up emotions with an accusation that the West had tried to trick Serbia into accepting the secession of Kosovo by offering it EU membership.

'Kosovo belongs to Serbia,' the usually reserved Kostunica screamed. 'It has always been so and it will be so forever.'

'No force, no threats or promises can change that,' he said. Kostunica had frozen Serbia's approach to EU membership in protest against Western support of Kosovo, branding the presumed exchange of Kosovo for membership of the EU an 'indecent proposal.'

The ultra-nationalist opposition leader Tomislav Nikolic compared the West of the present to wartime Germany: 'Hitler could not take Kosovo and neither will these of today.'

Also under siege was the B92 media house, which has been critical of Serbia's path of confrontation with the West over Kosovo.

Earlier, one of the speakers of the rally, the acclaimed film director Emir Kusturica, referred to opposition media as 'domestic mice' working for 'handouts.'