NEW YORK, March 27: About 200 anti-war protesters were arrested on Thursday morning as they virtually closed down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue for hours during the morning rush.

The protesters lay down on the streets pretending to be “dead Iraqis” and police had a tough time putting them in handcuffs and then loading them into police vehicles.

Anti-war groups had called for a day of widespread civil disobedience, including blocking busy intersections and staging a “die-in” to protest media and corporate “profiteering from the war.”

As helicopters hovered overhead, the protesters — chanting “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Bush’s war has to go!” and “Peace now!” jammed police pens near St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Police and security officers placed a web of barricades at adjacent Rockefeller Centre, home of the GE Building, and NBC TV studios to prevent a planned “die-in” there.

One Fifth Avenue protester held a sign showing a picture of parrots and the words, “Don’t Parrot the Right-wing Propaganda.” Another protester held up a sign that said, “Embedded? or In Bed?” Embedded, the protester said, meant that “journalists are presenting almost exclusively the military view of this war.”

Agencies add: Construction workers and office workers passing by engaged the demonstrators, saying things like “You don’t know what you are talking about” and “Go back to school”.

Demonstrators taking part in the “die-in” broke through police barricades along the avenue, lay on their backs in the street and waited for officers to remove them. Some were holding large photographs of civilian war victims.

Six demonstrators carrying sticks and using them to hit a small rubber ball on the sidewalk, were pushed up against the window of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store by police officers and arrested, witnesses said.

A smaller group held a funeral march for the death of US soldiers.