President Bill Clinton wrote to Chinese President Jiang Zemin yesterday to offer his regrets for NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on Friday night.
Mr Clinton also asked the Chinese leader for his help in protecting protect American officials barricaded inside the US Embassy in Beijing for the past two days. The letter was delivered to the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
Earlier, the United States and NATO vowed to intensify air strikes on Yugoslavia following the bombing, which Mr Clinton described as "a tragic mistake". The NATO Secretary General, Mr Javier Solana, while expressing regret, also said that the air strikes would continue.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is apparently taking the blame for the bombing of the embassy which led to its destruction and the deaths of three journalists taking refuge there.
CNN reported last night that the bombing was due to outdated maps provided by the agency which did not show that the Chinese Embassy had moved years ago. In a joint statement, US Secretary of Defence Mr William Cohen and the CIA Director, Mr George Tenet, said they regretted the loss of life and injuries but the bombing of the embassy was "an error".
"Those involved in targeting mistakenly believed that the Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement was at the location that was hit. The military supply facility was the intended target, certainly not the Chinese embassy."
While there was amazement in defence and diplomatic circles that US intelligence could have failed to identify the Chinese embassy, a senior State Department official, Mr Tom Pickering, said on TV that anyone who believed the bombing was not an accident was "certifiable". Out of some "18,000 NATO sorties, less than 10 have gone astray". He believed that China would not veto any future UN Security Council resolution to restore peace to Kosovo.
China called an emergency meeting of the Security Council at the weekend to condemn the bombing as "barbaric" but was unable to get a majority to vote.
President Clinton rejected the accusations from China, Russia and other countries that the bombing was "barbaric". He countered that what was "barbaric" was the ethnic cleansing being practised by President Milosevic in Kosovo.
The Chinese ambassador to the US, Mr Li Zhaoxing, said that any attempt "to whitewash the atrocity" of the embassy bombing was wrong. He would not spell out what "further action" China would take over the bombing until the investigation it sought had been carried out.
At the daily briefing in Brussels the NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said the embassy was not intentionally targeted. "The planned target was the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement in Belgrade but the wrong building was attacked. The two buildings are close together. This was a terrible accident," he said.
A suggestion that the bombing was an act of "gross incompetence" was too much for Mr Shea. "We have apologised and acknowledged where the mistake lies. It will not happen again; we are not allowing another mistake."
Meanwhile the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Robinson, has again strongly criticised NATO for killing and injuring civilians in its air strikes, according to an RTE report. She was speaking in Montenegro, the smaller republic in the Yugoslav federation.
In Belgrade, the 60,000 Chinese who live in Yugoslavia took to the streets and the bridges to protest at the bombing of their embassy.
"They are standing with us. They know the bombing is wrong," said Ms Ljubinka Milic, who stood watching with her friends. "We are a small country, but China is a big country and now they have been bombed also."