The Pentagon said NATO attacked a "command and control centre". The Serbs called it an assassination attempt. But Mr Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia, was not at home when NATO dropped three laser-guided bombs on number 15 Uzicka Street in the southern Belgrade suburb of Dedinje before dawn yesterday. Mr Milosevic moved into the elegant two-storey white villa with its columns and arches about 18 months ago with his wife, Ms Mira Markovic, their daughter Marija and their married son Marko. The Serb leader's three-month-old grandson Marko was also living in the house, which is the property of the Yugoslav federal government.
NATO officials claim that Mr Milosevic sleeps in different underground bunkers every night. But sources here claimed the bombs were dropped on the wing of the house where the Milosevic family had their bedrooms. US law forbids the assassination of foreign heads of state.
It was the second time in as many days that NATO struck a target closely associated with Mr Milosevic and his family. On Wednesday, cruise missiles severely damaged the 24-storey high-rise that housed the headquarters of the Yugoslav president's Socialist Party of Serbia, as well as offices belonging to Ms Markovic's Yugoslav Left party and television and radio stations owned by their family.
For many Yugoslavs, yesterday's bombing of Mr Milosevic's home was also an attack on their history. For 35 years the house had been the principal residence of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the founder of modern Yugoslavia.
"NATO has bombed the place that was the symbol of Tito's life," Miroslav Lazanski, one of Serbia's best known newspaper and television commentators told The Irish Times. "If NATO wanted to undermine the morale of the Yugoslavs they were very wrong, because this house is not only the president's house, it is a symbol of Yugoslavia since 1945 and a kind of national museum. This is state terrorism." The violent break-up of Yugoslavia began in 1991, eight years after Tito's death.
A host of world figures, including Britain's Queen Elizabeth, Lord Mountbatten, Winston and Randolph Churchill, Richard Nixon and Indira Ghandi, were received by Tito at number 15 Uzicka Street. When the bombs exploded Tito's bones must have rattled in their white marble sarcophagus in the Kuca Cvece (house of flowers) mausoleum just a few hundred metres away. Davorjanka Paunovic, Tito's favourite mistress, whom the Germans took prisoner during the war, is also buried in the garden.
At least until the Milosevics moved in, Tito's office and library were kept exactly as he had left them; a clock was stopped at the moment of his death, and on the morning of his final departure for hospital, copies of Politika and Borba were left on his desk with their now horrifically inappropriate Yugoslav slogan of "brotherhood and unity". Gifts from world leaders - hunting rifles from Brezhnev, a signed copy of Churchill's History of the Second World War, a diamond-encrusted ashtray from Nasser and a coffee service from Saddam Hussein - were displayed there.
Although Tito was half Slovene and half Croatian, Serbian neocommunists like President Milo sevic and his wife still revere him as the defender of Yugoslav unity. Throughout the wars of the past eight years, Mr Milosevic has claimed to fulfill the same role. "Both Mr Milosevic and Mrs Markovic state in every interview that they respect and honour Tito," Mr Lazanski said.
The bombing of his private residence did not prevent Mr Milosevic receiving the former Russian prime minister Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin at Beli Dvor, the former palace of the King of Yugoslavia and the official presidential residence, a few hours later. Mr Chernomyrdin is President Boris Yeltsin's special envoy on Yugoslavia, but Serb officials said they expected no results from his visit.
On Wednesday night, Mr Milosevic granted a rare interview to a small US television station called KHOU-TV. Speaking English, the Serb leader blamed NATO for the Albanian refugee crisis. "NATO is creating refugees," he said. "That is their tactic, to create as many refugees as possible. That is their alibi . . . Everybody is running away because of the bombing - Serbs, Turks, gypsies, Albanians . . . The birds are flying away, the deer are running away."
Once the bombing stops, Mr Milosevic said, "then it will be very easy to continue [the] political process". At the Rambouillet and Paris peace talks, western powers had tried to impose independence, not autonomy, for the Albanian Kosovans, he added, claiming that the agreement which the Serb delegation refused to sign would have given the ethnic Albanians "the right to organise [a] new state within Serbia".
Asked to explain consistent Albanian testimony of extortion and murder by Serb forces, Mr Milosevic replied: "Those who you saw on television were told to say that by [the] UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army] killers, kidnappers and rapists who are terrorising not only Serbs but Albanians."