Thousands Mourn Lithuanian Slain by Troops

Thousands of grieving Lithuanians returned to the streets of Vilnius on Saturday, paying their last respects to a young man killed in the Soviet crackdown on the republic’s independence movement.

“The land the Pope calls Mary’s land was drenched in blood this year, but we hope flowers of freedom and justice will now grow on this land,” the Rev. Pranciskus Vaicekonis told mourners in the 300-year-old Saints Peter and Paul Church.

Several thousand people marched from a funeral home to the church to mourn Jonas Tautkus, 21, the 20th person to die in the Baltics since the Kremlin started using force to crush the independence drives.

Tautkus died Wednesday of a gunshot wound to the head that he suffered at a military checkpoint the day before. Lithuanian officials said the soldiers shot him because he refused to get out of his car. The military said a ricochet bullet hit Tautkus.

The crowd was not as big as a mass funeral procession on Jan. 16 for nine of the 13 people beaten, shot or crushed to death by Soviet tanks in a Jan. 13 assault on Lithuania’s broadcasting center. One soldier also died in that assault.

There was more violence Friday night. A parliamentary spokeswoman said a new joint patrol of Soviet police and soldiers beat a 22-year-old Lithuanian man on a Vilnius street.

It was the first reported violence involving the joint army-police patrols, which Baltic leaders see as the Kremlin’s attempt to strengthen control over their breakaway republics.

The Lithuanian parliamentary spokeswoman, Rita Dapkus, said four police officers and soldiers armed with automatic weapons stopped Valdas Puzinas in downtown Vilnius. The patrol demanded his identification papers, but before he could produce his documents the soldiers and police knocked him to the ground and beat him with the butts of their automatic rifles, Dapkus said.

“These soldiers are not human beings, they are beasts,” Dapkus quoted Puzinas as saying.