Angry protesters clashed with police in a town in western Serbia and in the capital of Belgrade on Saturday as tensions soared in the Balkan nation following days of violent demonstrations. Wearing scarves over their faces and chanting slogans against President Aleksandar Vucic, a group of young men threw flares at his Serbian Progressive Party office in Valjevo, some 60 miles from Belgrade. They set fire to the office before clashing with riot police in a downtown area, the AP reports. Officers threw multiple rounds of tear gas and charged at the demonstrators, who hurled bottles, rocks, and flares at them.
Similar clashes erupted on Saturday evening in Belgrade, with police directing tear gas at protesters while battling the protesters who set garbage containers on fire. The protesters in Valjevo turned out to the streets to protest what they say is police brutality. There were no immediate reports on the numbers of injured people in either Valjevo or Belgrade. Serbia has been gripped by protests since November, when a train station canopy collapse killed 16 people. Many blamed the tragedy on poor renovation work resulting from widespread corruption in infrastructure projects.
The student-led protests had been largely peaceful for months, per the AP. The situation has put pressure on Serbia's increasingly autocratic president, who has refused the protesters' demand to call an early parliamentary election. Vucic has accused the protesters of following orders from abroad to "destroy Serbia" and promised a crackdown on the nationwide movement led by university students. The protest in Valjevo drew several thousand people after a video on social media showed a young man from the town being severely beaten by police during a protest earlier this week. It was the second such attack on the SNS party offices this week, after protesters demolished the party headquarters in the northern city of Novi Sad on Wednesday.
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