General Motors Europe announced on Thursday it is to close an entire car production plant in Belgium, making 2,600 workers redundant and ramping up an already tense climate of social unrest. "Our intention today is to stop production in a matter of a few months," new chief executive Nick Reilly told a Brussels press conference, suggesting June or July as the likeliest date.

A new line of small sports utility vehicles will now be built in South Korea instead, he said. It is the second major factory closure announced by carmakers in Europe this month, after Italy's Fiat acted to shut a plant in Sicily.

Europe-wide restructuring at GM's Opel unit is expected to shed 8,300 jobs from a total of almost 50,000 - half of which are located in Germany. Reilly said that about 4,000 of the jobs going would be German positions. The Belgian factory in northern Antwerp, home to the world's biggest diamond market and one of the world's five largest ports, is the only GM plant so far to face being locked up.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2010