“I have been fighting all this chaos for few days since I found out about the picture. I also received terrible threats online,” Gjuraj told BIRN.

He said he had reported the threats to the police on April 26.

For nationalists in Serbia, angered about the loss more than a decade ago of the former province of Kosovo – which is mainly inhabited by ethnic Albanians – the eagle gesture is seen as infuriating and insulting.

Last June, two Swiss footballers of Albanian nationality, Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri, outraged Serbian officials and the public by celebrating their goals against Serbia in the World Cup with eagle hand gestures. FIFA fined them for doing so.

Human rights activists and most opposition parties in Serbia have condemned the assaults on the bakery in Belgrade – but one right-wing MP, Srdjan Nogo, not only attended the affray but defended it s legitimate.

He claimed that local “citizens [had] stood up to the provocations of the Albanian owner of the bakery”.

“It is time you went back where you came came,” the head of the far-right Srbska Cast [Serbian Honour] group, Bojan Stojkovic, wrote on Instagram.

Some locals disagree. They have defended their neighbour, popping in to the bakery, despite the presence of the protesting rightists, to do their shopping there.

A similar case stirred the usually calm village of Dolovo in the Banat region of the northern province of Vojvodina last month.

Media reported that a group of villagers gathered on March 21 in front of the local bakery, which was owned by ethnic Albanians, after they apparently posted pictures on Facebook of themselves making eagle gestures with their hands.

One picture showed two members of the family holding two guns, with one of them saying: “We are going to hunt. Want to joins us?”

Milica Djurdjevic, from the far-right Zavetnici movement, wrote on Facebook that the village had “become target of Greater Albania”.

“I wonder … how it is possible that Albanian separatists are publicly opening bakeries and walking with weapons in the Banat,” Djurdjevic said on March 21.

Days later, media reported that the Albanian family had left Dolovo and gone to Kosovo.