Gunmen Fire on Supporters of Georgia President; 2 Slain

Men in black masks opened fire with automatic weapons on supporters of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia on Friday, killing at least two unarmed people and wounding 25 others, as power in this violence-seared republic ebbed from the elected head of state to his foes.

While Gamsakhurdia’s enemies and allies continued to battle with Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns and T-54 tanks, the afternoon slayings here at a street demonstration were a new, terrible twist in the spiral of bloodshed.

Friday’s rally began in a large square next to the Didube railway station several miles from the center of Tbilisi. As about 2,000 Gamsakhurdia backers chanted and rallied in an empty lot, three cars pulled up carrying masked men wearing cowls on their heads and equipped with automatic weapons.

The gunmen got out and fired into the air to disperse the meeting, held in defiance of the state of emergency proclaimed Thursday by the Military Council, formed by the armed opposition. At the crack of the gunfire, hundreds of demonstrators, many of them women, gathered in panic, some stumbling and falling as they tripped over bumps and holes in the ground.

But a group of about 40 outraged Gamsakhurdia loyalists marched toward the attackers and showered them with mud and stones. At least one of the men with assault rifles lowered the muzzle of his weapon and blasted away at the crowd; at least four people were hit by bullets.

By sheer force of numbers, the crowd overwhelmed one of the gunmen, who may have run out of ammunition. They hustled him into a blue minivan. Angry Georgians lined up outside to take turns pummeling and kicking the gunman. He was later removed from the vehicle, motionless and with glazed eyes, after apparently having been beaten to death.

Another assailant was captured by a group of loyalist troops, who rapidly appeared and spirited him away so the crowd could not harm him. Georgians said four of the gunmen were captured but that as many as six others got away in the vehicle they came in--a white, Soviet-made sedan.

According to the Ministry of Health, two demonstrators died in the gunfire--a 26-year-old man and a middle-aged man--and two more were reported near death with bullet wounds. Twenty-five people were hurt, including one child, although the ministry’s count seemed to also include demonstrators injured in the stampede to escape.

After the attack, the demonstrators, some now smeared with blood, wept, shouted their hatred of the “fascists” trying to depose their president or wandered in a daze around the lot, which was down a slope from railroad tracks and near an entrance to a Tbilisi subway station.

There was no immediate clue as to the assailants’ identities or who had sent them. Anti-Gamsakhurdia activists immediately accused the president of masterminding the attack to discredit them.

Demonstrators who tried to march from the rally site to continue their show of support for the president were turned back at another location by opposition troops who fired in the air. In the late afternoon, Rustaveli Prospekt, the Georgian capital’s main thoroughfare, was raked by murderous fire, as snipers defending Gamsakhurdia’s command post in a bunker under the Parliament dueled with opposition riflemen and machine-gunners.

In a daring morning maneuver, opposition troops, according to their leaders, formed a ring about a mile in circumference around Government House, cutting off the exit and entrance that they had previously allowed their enemies. “A bird couldn’t fly out of there now,” said one ultra-radical leader, Georgy Chanturia, of the National Democratic Party.

At the command post of the opposition-allied National Guard, located in the office building that had once housed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, guardsmen in the intelligence section said presidential troops can now place their forward perimeter no more than 50 yards from Government House.

With National Guard commander Tengiz Kitovani and Dzhaba Ioseliani, the leader of one of the republic’s private militias, now spearheading the struggle to oust Gamsakhurdia, opposition forces were forming their own government.

In an ominous development for the survival of Gamsakhurdia’s claims on power, officials from Tbilisi’s police and prosecutors’ office flocked to Ioseliani’s headquarters on Friday to submit to the authority of the new Military Council. According to Georgians who attended the closed meetings, the council named Roman Gbentsadze and Bakhtang Razmadze to replace Gamsakhurdia loyalists at the Interior Ministry and prosecutor’s office. Other appointments were to be announced later.

Gamsakhurdia, interviewed in his bunker by a small group of American journalists, reiterated his confidence that the Georgian people will never support the “bandits” trying to seize power by unconstitutional means.

But besides the ill-fated rally on Tbilisi’s outskirts, there was little proof that Gamsakhurdia--who won 87% of the presidential vote last May--could still rally mass support. State radio was still in his government’s hands but Tiblisi’s television studios and transmitter have fallen under the control of the opposition.

The Military Council called on Gamsakhurdia to surrender and offered guarantees of safety for him and his family. He said his family is living at a residence in town. Gamsakhurdia on Friday was still forecasting victory and calling on his countrymen to support him with or without arms.

Chanturia, the radical opposition leader, advocated dousing Government House with gasoline and setting it on fire to transform it into a giant funeral pyre. But the only thing holding back the opposition, he asserted, is that many children and other civilians are being held hostage inside the building.

Gamsakhurdia called that charge a “bald-faced lie,” and Western reporters have seen no sign of detainees in the parts of the vast building they have been allowed to visit.