Envoys take cover under table Nato missile shockwaves smash embassy windows
By Richard Norton-Taylor and David Hearst
Sweden's ambassador to Yugoslavia yesterday described how guests at a dinner party at his Swiss counterpart's residence had dived under the table as an American cruise missile flew past on its way to a nearby fuel depot.
The latest in a series of embarrassing bombing blunders came to light as official sources privately admitted that Nato's missiles and high-flying aircraft were running out of military targets.
'At quarter past eight we had just got to dessert when it exploded,' said Mats Staffansson, whose own residence was shaken by a stray Nato bomb the previous night.
Describing what until then had been a sedate diplomatic dinner hosted by the Swiss ambassador, Paul Wipfli, in Belgrade on Thursday, he said: 'Four cruise missiles hit a fuel depot just 300 metres from the Swiss residence and an enormous pressure wave shattered a very large window in the dining room. Myself, the Slovakian ambassador and the Vatican's ambassador immediately threw ourselves under the table to avoid flying glass,' he told the Swedish daily, Aftonposten.
Mr Staffansson said the guests had a clear view of the missiles on the 58th night of Nato air strikes.
The bomb 24 hours earlier shattered windows in Mr Staffansson's residence and provoked protests from the Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson. No one at the embassy was hurt.
Nato has not acknowledged Serbian claims that the bomb - aimed at an army barracks - instead hit a hospital where four people were killed. The barracks were in a smart Belgrade suburb where President Slobodan Milosevic is said to live and work.
A spokeswoman for the Swiss foreign ministry said Berne had made formal diplomatic representation to Nato and Washington: 'We made a statement at Nato saying that we expect in future not to be targeted or even to be subject to collateral damage as a result of the bombing campaign.'
As Joschka Fisher, the German foreign minister, called on Nato to discuss targeting policy as a matter of urgency, the organisation's secretary general, Javier Solana, contacted the countries whose diplomatic missions in Belgrade have been damaged to apologise and stress the harm was unintentional.
The Spanish, Indian, Norwegian and Hungarian ambassadors' residences have also been damaged. 'We have obviously expressed our apologies for any inconvenience that may have been caused,' said Nato's spokesman, Jamie Shea.
Two weeks ago Nato bombed the Chinese embassy in a blunder Washington blamed on CIA officers reading an old map of the city. Three people were killed and the diplomatic repercussions are continuing.
Mr Shea argued that the air campaign remained extremely accurate. Of the 10,000 missiles dropped so far, only 12 had missed their targets and caused unintended damage or casualties, he said.
Nato strikes on a prison in Kosovo yesterday killed 19 people, including the deputy governor, and wounded several others, Serb media reported.
The prison's governor, Aleksander Rakocevic, told western reporters brought to the scene near Istok, about 45 miles west of the provincial capital Pristina, that he believed three or four inmates had escaped. Serb officials said many prisoners had been jailed for 'terrorist' offences, the term used to describe membership of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The jail was last hit two days ago in an attack that killed two prisoners and injured two guards. A Serb official accused Nato of targeting the prison in a bid to free the prisoners, saying: 'One thousand prisoners - a perfect army.' Nato's military spokesman, General Walter Jertz, would only confirm that Istok, in north-western Kosovo, had been on the bombers' target list. He said the focus had been a 'security complex which was a militarily significant target'.
Western defence sources said Nato was running out of military targets as commanders were under intense political pressure to maintain the momentum of their campaign. Air Marshal Sir John Day, deputy chief of the defence staff, said that 'persistent poor weather' meant no attacks could be carried out on Thursday against Serb forces on the ground in Kosovo.
'If you are carrying out 700 strikes a day, you become a rubble mover,' said Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.