BELGRADE (AFP)--The charred body found inside the U.S. embassy of Belgrade after it was set ablaze by rioters earlier this week was a young Serbian man whose family had fled Kosovo, reports said Saturday. 

The remains of Zoran Vujovic, a 21-year-old student from Serbia's second city of Novi Sad, were identified by his father after he failed to show up after the attack on the U.S. embassy Thursday night, said the daily Blic. 

A Belgrade court spokeswoman confirmed the identity of the victim. 

"Following the DNA analysis, the court has been officially informed that the identity of the person whose body burned in the U.S. embassy was Zoran Vujovic from Novi Sad," Ivana Ramic told state-run Tanjug news agency. 

Vujovic, who was also named in the Alo and Kurir tabloids, had traveled to Belgrade with his 20-year-old brother Lazar and friends to demonstrate against Kosovo's unilateral independence declaration, made Sunday. 

His father, Milan, and mother, Ljiljana, reported him as missing late Thursday after he failed to respond to telephone calls and return to Novi Sad, some 70 kilometres  north of Belgrade, Blic said, citing a relative. 

The father visited a Belgrade prison looking for his son when he was called by investigators to the pathology department of Serbia's main military hospital, where an autopsy was underway. 

"He saw the carbonised body of his older son. He recognised him by a gold necklace and metal buckle of the belt," the relative told the daily. 

The Vujovic family was expelled by Kosovo's Muslim Albanians and they settled in Novi Sad from Caglavica, a Serb-populated village near the Kosovo capital Pristina, in July 1999, at the end of a NATO bombing campaign to stop a Serbian crackdown on Kosovo Albanians.