Soviet Commandos Seize Latvian Interior Ministry : Baltics: Four die in Riga fighting. Troops, supporting the anti-independence movement, later leave building.

Soviet commandos shot their way into the headquarters of the Latvian Interior Ministry on Sunday night, seizing the building in a gun battle that raged in central Riga, the Latvian capital, for 90 minutes. Four people were killed and at least nine wounded, according to initial reports.

The 30 “black berets” from the Soviet Interior Ministry’s elite special forces apparently met unexpected resistance from the armed headquarters guards and other officers on duty and used stun grenades and then machine-gun fire to capture the five-story building, which they held for five hours.

Red and green tracers shot across the night sky, the explosion of grenades echoed through the capital and several cars, perhaps set on fire as a diversion, burned brightly and filled the air with smoke. Much of the battle was broadcast by Latvian television later in the evening.

The fighting, which began slightly after 9 p.m. local time, spread for a time to the square in front of the Parliament building as other commandos in armored vehicles reportedly opened fire to prevent Latvians from rushing to the Interior Ministry to assist guards.

Latvian authorities said two local policemen and two civilians, one reported to be a local television newsman, had been killed in the fighting, according to the independent Baltic News Service. Nine people were hospitalized with wounds, including a Moscow television cameraman and a Finnish journalist.

More casualties were likely inside the building, Latvian officials told Baltic News Service’s correspondent in Riga, but the building was in the hands of the Soviet troops after more than an hour of fighting, floor to floor.

“They have taken the building,” Zenon Indrikovs, a deputy interior minister, said by telephone from within the building. “Further resistance is useless. We are captured. The Soviets have us.”

The Interior Ministry is the principal law enforcement agency in Latvia, supervising police, passport and other agencies.

Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis, speaking on Latvian television, said that he had talked with Boris Pugo, the Soviet interior minister and former Latvian Communist Party chief, and Col. Gen. Fyodor M. Kuzmin, commander of the Baltic military region, in an effort to halt the fighting and secure the commandos’ eventual withdrawal.

He appealed to Latvians not to provoke the commandos and to remain inside. He ordered Latvian police not to counterattack but only to defend themselves.

But Andris Bunka, a deputy prime minister, summoned all of Latvia’s Interior Ministry forces to Riga with their armored vehicles, perhaps in an effort to retake the building or at least strengthen the guard at other ministries.

The commandos also reportedly called for assistance, from a Soviet army paratroop regiment stationed near Riga.

“The battle for Riga may just be starting,” a government spokeswoman said by telephone from the barricaded Parliament building. “We expect that the next attack will be on us.”

But five hours after the fighting began, two armored personnel carriers roared up to the Interior Ministry at 2 a.m. local time Monday, and the commandos pulled out, apparently under orders from Moscow.

The commandos apparently were fighting on behalf of the newly formed All-Latvian Public Salvation Committee, which had declared on Saturday that it intended to seize power from the republic’s elected pro-independence government and thus end Latvia’s efforts to secede from the Soviet Union.

“In the present conditions, on the demand of the working people, the All-Latvian Public Salvation Committee is assuming the responsibility for the further destiny of Soviet Latvia and is proclaiming the transfer to it of the whole of state power for a period of stabilization of the situation and the dissolution of Parliament and the government,” the group said.

Led by officials of the Latvian Communist Party, the organization called on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to impose direct rule on the republic, removing the elected government and appointing his own administrators with authority to rule by decree.

“We were asking for a stop to this ‘civil war,’ ” Ilmars Bisers, Latvia’s first deputy prime minister, told The Times by telephone, “but it looks like this ‘newly elected government’ is planning to seize ministries, starting with our Interior Ministry. These forces constitute its army.”

The committee, which accused the nationalist government of attempting to establish a “bourgeois dictatorship” and “a pro-fascist power structure,” declared that its presidium would form a new government and would move immediately to “liquidate” any departments it felt were operating in violation of Soviet or Latvian law.

The central government in Moscow has been intensifying its pressure on all three Baltic republics--Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--to nullify the declarations of independence adopted last year by their parliaments, the first democratically elected in 50 years, and to remain within the Soviet Union or, at least, follow the procedures it has laid down for secession.

The three were independent states between the two world wars and were absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940 in a deal with Nazi Germany.

The commandos’ assault in Riga followed the seizure by paratroops Jan. 13 of the Lithuanian government’s radio and television facilities in Vilnius in the name of the Lithuanian Committee of National Salvation, another pro-Soviet group. Thirteen civilians and one soldier were killed in that operation.

The commandos are directly subordinated to Pugo, the Soviet interior minister and former Communist Party chief in Latvia, and his deputy, Gen. Boris Gromov, making it difficult for the central government to deny responsibility for the Riga attack as they did in Vilnius.

Romualdas Zukas, the leader of the Latvian Popular Front, described the commandos as “the gravest and most explosive problem in the republic--they are practically uncontrollable.” He noted in a telephone interview that negotiations were to have opened in Moscow today on Latvia’s demand that they be pulled out.

Kuzmin, the regional military commander, had demanded last week that the Latvian police and interior troops surrender their weapons, and the central government’s commandos had raided a police station and disarmed several units in a show of strength.

Anatoly A. Denisov, a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies from Leningrad, had warned on Sunday at the end of a visit to Riga by a seven-man parliamentary delegation that the looming confrontation there must be avoided and bloodshed averted.

“Our country is still a single entity,” Denisov told journalists. “But a coup d’etat in one republic could lead to coups all over. . . . A coup could happen anywhere and for any reason because social tensions across the country are extremely high.”

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Latvians in a demonstration of support for the pro-independence government of President Anatolijs Gorbunovs, had turned out for the funeral of a government driver, Roberts Murnieks, 39, who was shot by the commandos last Wednesday while crossing a bridge near a suburban military base.