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<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=yspsctnhdln>Police arrest 152 Belgrade fans for racism</TD></TR><TR><TD height=7><SPACER type="block" width="1" height="1"></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><SPAN class=ysptimedate></SPAN>
By Zoran Milosavljevic
BELGRADE, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Belgrade police arrested 152 fans for racist insults at a Serbian second division match between local team Rad and Novi Pazar late on Wednesday .
"Police officers have arrested 152 Rad supporters, including 47 juveniles," police said. "The offenders shouted slogans inciting racial, ethnic and religious hatred and intolerance."
The home fans shouted anti-Muslim slogans at Novi Pazar players and police moved in to remove them from the stadium.
Novi Pazar is a Muslim-majority town in western Serbia. Some ultranationalist Serbs are hostile to Muslims, often glorifying the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.
It was a second outbreak of racism at Serbia's soccer grounds in four days after a black player was abused during a first division match on Saturday.
Borac Cacak's Zimbabwean striker Mike Tawmanjira was insulted by the club's fans who wore white hoods with Ku Klux Klan insignia, did a Nazi salute and held a banner saying the player was unwelcome in Serbia.
Eight of them face charges of spreading racial hatred and prison terms up to five years if convicted.
Serbia's sports and education minister Slobodan Vuksanovic strongly condemned the incidents and said "decisive action must be taken to deal with these people who have lost their way."
"There will be no order unless the judicial authorities react swiftly and impose harsh penalties on the offenders," he told B 92 television.
"We don't need to invent any new solutions, we just have to implement what the whole world already has in order to combat this deviation many societies are obviously prone to." </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
By Zoran Milosavljevic
BELGRADE, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Belgrade police arrested 152 fans for racist insults at a Serbian second division match between local team Rad and Novi Pazar late on Wednesday .
"Police officers have arrested 152 Rad supporters, including 47 juveniles," police said. "The offenders shouted slogans inciting racial, ethnic and religious hatred and intolerance."
The home fans shouted anti-Muslim slogans at Novi Pazar players and police moved in to remove them from the stadium.
Novi Pazar is a Muslim-majority town in western Serbia. Some ultranationalist Serbs are hostile to Muslims, often glorifying the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.
It was a second outbreak of racism at Serbia's soccer grounds in four days after a black player was abused during a first division match on Saturday.
Borac Cacak's Zimbabwean striker Mike Tawmanjira was insulted by the club's fans who wore white hoods with Ku Klux Klan insignia, did a Nazi salute and held a banner saying the player was unwelcome in Serbia.
Eight of them face charges of spreading racial hatred and prison terms up to five years if convicted.
Serbia's sports and education minister Slobodan Vuksanovic strongly condemned the incidents and said "decisive action must be taken to deal with these people who have lost their way."
"There will be no order unless the judicial authorities react swiftly and impose harsh penalties on the offenders," he told B 92 television.
"We don't need to invent any new solutions, we just have to implement what the whole world already has in order to combat this deviation many societies are obviously prone to." </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>