ANTI-WAR campaigners staged a "die-in" outside a tank factory yesterday to show their opposition to any conflict in Iraq.

Wearing white boilersuits and face masks spattered with red dye, they lay down at the entrance to the Vickers plant, in Newcastle, as police kept watch.

Later, the small group confronted employees leaving the site at the end of their shifts with leaflets and posters saying "No war on Iraq".

Campaigners said they were holding the protest ahead of the journey of 50 Vickers' engineers to Kuwait on Thursday to adapt British Challenger tanks for any proposed invasion of Iraq.

Protestor Keith Metcalfe, a 29-year-old charity worker from Washington, Wearside, said they wanted the workers to think again about their actions.

He said: "We are trying to reach out to the people working at Vickers and make them realise that their work is going to result in the deaths of thousands of men and women in Iraq. We are asking the workers to please think about the families they are going to destroy."

The white masks were worn to ''symbolise the unknown people who will never be recognised and whose deaths will go completely unnoticed, he said."

''We are saying it is Tony Blair's war. The country can't go to war because one man thinks it is the right thing to do," he said.

A spokesman for Vickers declined to comment on the protest.