BELGRADE, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- Dignitaries from home and abroad joined large crowds of mourners on Thursday to bid farewell to late Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo's capital of Pristina.

    Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the streets in freezing weather to pay their last respects to the late president as the carriage bearing his coffin proceeded from the Assembly building to a funeral ceremony in a sports center, as shown from the BBC broadcast.

    The ceremony was attended by a number of international leaders,among them EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, head of the UN mission in Kosovo Soren Jessen-Petersen and UN special envoy for Kosovo future status talks Martti Ahtisaari. Over 30 delegations were present at the funeral.

    Although Solana said "This is not a moment to discuss anything"after a meeting with Jessen-Petersen and members of the Albanian team for the status talks, he urged Kosovo leaders to elect a new president, the official Tanjug news agency reported.

    "What came to my mind yesterday and also today is to see the vacuum that he leaves be filled by people with a sense of responsibility, with a sense of unity, with a sense of generosity for the people of Kosovo," Solana was quoted by Tanjug as saying.

    "Sooner the decisions are taken, better for everybody," he said.

    Rugova died of lung cancer on Jan. 21 at the age of 61. He led Albanian's negotiating team in the province's future status talks,which was originally set for Jan. 25 in Vienna.

    His strong leadership was seen as crucial in the talks and his death forced the United Nations to postpone until early February the first face-to-face talks between Kosovo's Albanian leaders and Serbia. Yet many analysts say none of Rugova's likely successors has enough of the diplomatic acumen that he had on the world stage in the ethnic Albanian push for independence.

    Legally still a part of Serbia, Kosovo has been run by UN and NATO since mid-1999. Enditem