50 Soviet Soldiers Occupy Vilnius Prosecutor’s Office

About 50 armed Soviet soldiers dressed as police officers stormed the Lithuanian Prosecutor’s Office today, expelled its employees and occupied the building, said witnesses and spokesmen for the republic’s Parliament.

The incident occurred one day after Lithuania’s secessionist government accused the Kremlin of backing forces bent on its overthrow.

Elsewhere in the Baltic, a KGB officer said security forces have increased surveillance of fishing boats to prevent arms shipments to the republic.

Lt. Gen. V. Shlyakhtin told the weekly Pravitelstvenny Vyestnik that frontier guard units on land have also been strengthened, leave and weekends canceled and training courses cut short.

Lithuania and Moscow have faced off in a tense showdown since the republic declared its independence on March 11. Statements in recent days indicate movement toward a common ground, including a possible referendum by Lithuanians.

But today, men armed with automatic weapons entered the Prosecutor’s Office, site of a previous Soviet attempt to seize authority from officials appointed by the breakway republic’s government.

The men “fully occupied the building, and there are six or eight paratroopers on each floor dressed as policemen,” Henrika Pocei, secretary to Lithuania’s chief prosecutor, said in a telephone interview from Vilnius.

A bulletin put out by the Lithuanian Supreme Council (legislature) quoted Kazimieras Motieka, deputy head of the Parliament, as saying soldiers were “dressed in police uniforms and carried boxes of ammunition with them into the building.”

The chief prosecutor is the republic’s top law enforcement official. A confrontation arose at the same offices last week when Moscow officials tried to remove Arturas Paulauskas, the chief prosecutor appointed by the new Lithuanian government, and install their own man.

Employees refused to obey the Moscow loyalist, and several soldiers were stationed in the building Friday in the first occupation by Soviet troops of a Lithuanian government building. Soldiers had previously taken control of several Communist Party buildings.

“The Soviet Union, with the aid of its army, supports a small group of its political supporters which is attempting to restore the old structures of the Soviet administration,” Lithuania’s Parliament said in a statement Wednesday.

“There is therefore a threat to overthrow the legally elected authority and the government,” said the statement, broadcast on Lithuanian radio.