LAUSANNE/GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) - Anarchists and anti-capitalists rampaged through the plush streets of Geneva and Lausanne Sunday, smashing shops and looting businesses as world leaders met beyond their reach in France.
Police detained several hundred youths, most of them in Lausanne, and the skirmishes continued into the evening in Geneva while world leaders settled down unperturbed to dinner some 32 miles away.
In Geneva, home to the World Trade Organization and some of the world's richest private banks, police fired anti-riot pellets and tear gas against gangs hurling stones and bottles.
Host France chose the Lake Geneva spa town of Evian for the June 1-3 annual meeting of the Group of Eight major industrial powers knowing narrow access roads made it easy to close it off to the often violent protesters who regard the G8 as a rich state club.
But that left the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne, where some of the invited Third World leaders were staying, and Geneva to bear the brunt of the protesters' fury.
"Within a few minutes...violent agitators carried out true urban guerrilla warfare and ravaged the center of Geneva, only to disappear and later melt into the peaceful demonstration," Geneva's head of Justice, Police and Security Micheline Spoerri told Swiss Television.
Clothing shops and petrol stations were smashed and ransacked by protesters, many wearing the trademark black T-shirt of the anarchists, to the chants of "No blood for oil," in a reference to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The "G8" includes industrialized Western nations and Russia, but leaders of some less developed, including China, India and Brazil, have also been invited.
PLUNDERING THE POOR
Anti-G8 protesters accuse rich states of plundering the economies of the developing world and say Third World leaders will come away with nothing but promises.
The violence overshadowed largely peaceful marches linking Geneva and the French frontier town of Annemasse, the nearest point to Evian demonstrators could reach, in which tens of thousands of people chanted slogans against the war in Iraq and world poverty.
March organizers were quick to condemn the disturbances and police said the groups of black-clad violent protesters appeared to have been well-coordinated in both cities.
"We have no idea who these people were. It has nothing to do with the demonstration, which was a very, very big success," Christophe Aguiton, one of the march organizers, told Reuters.
Geneva authorities switched part of a 900-strong German police contingent guarding Geneva airport, where heads of state arrived to be whisked away by helicopter, to the city center to protect against more incidents Sunday night.
Police detained around 400 people at a Lausanne campsite full of activists. One protester was seriously hurt when he fell from a bridge over a motorway that demonstrators were trying to block to prevent delegates reaching Evian.
A police spokesman said a policeman had cut a rope from which the demonstrator, a 39-year-old Englishman, was hanging to spread a banner.
Two policemen were also hurt, one with facial burns from a flare, in Lausanne.
French and Swiss police were on high alert after the mayhem that rocked the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, two years ago when police shot dead one protester.
G8 leaders are staying in Evian and those top officials being lodged in Lausanne crossed the lake by boat or helicopter.
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