The UN has become "ineffective," a "dead body" and a "subsidiary" of the United States, speakers told a rally of some 200 students from the Agriculture University.

They chanted slogans against US president George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and torched effigies of the key coalition leaders.

Protesters carried the wooden coffin on their shoulders as they paraded across the lawns of the campus before burying the casket.

Masoom Hussain, leader of the Shiite Muslim community's Imamia Students Organisation, accused the United States of waging the war to promote its economic interests.

"America wants to subjugate the entire world. It considers Islamic countries a major hurdle, that's why it is targetting Muslim states one after the other," Hussain said.

"The UN has totally failed to protect smaller states or safeguard the rights of Muslims. It failed to discharge its responsibility of preventing US tyrannies in Iraq."

Protest rallies and demonstrations have been staged daily in Muslim-dominated Pakistan, a key US ally in its 18-month war on terrorism, since the March 20 invasion of Iraq.

Some 200 students of the country's prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) in the eastern city of Lahore in a demonstration outside their campus carried paintings highlighting horrors of war.

The paintings specially prepared by the NCA students depicted destruction, devastation and deaths of civlians in the Iraqi conflict.

Some 500 traders and employees of Pakistan Railways earlier paraded through the main streets. Chanting slogans against the Anglo-American assaults on Iraq, they called for and immediate end of war.

The trade community has already announced a one-day shutter down strike in major Pakistani cities on Tuesday to express solidarity with the Iraqi people.

SPACE.WIRE