A summit of Asian leaders in Thailand was cancelled after anti-government protesters swarmed into the meeting's venue in Pattaya.
Thailand’s prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva imposed a state of emergency for a few hours but lifted it after the foreign leaders had left the country.
About half of them had had to be evacuated by helicopter from the venue to a nearby military airbase.
The summit fiasco is a huge embarrassment for Mr Abhisit's government, which came to power in December through parliamentary defections that the opposition says were engineered by the army.
Hundreds of red-shirted supporters of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra broke through lines of soldiers and invaded the media centre adjacent to the summit venue, the Royal Cliff hotel, blowing whistles, waving flags and shouting ‘Abhisit Out’.
After rampaging about the media centre, an elderly woman in a wheelchair among them, the protestors were soon huddled with reporters in impromptu news conferences around the conference centre, denouncing Abhisit's government as ‘anti-poor’.
The East Asia Summit brings together the 10 member nations of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand for discussions about trade, economic issues and regional security.
Investors are likely to see the government's failure to stop the demonstrators getting anywhere near the summit as a sign of Abhisit's indecisiveness, even if his aim was to avoid bloodshed.
