Azerbaijan Coup Attempt Crushed : Caucasus: Loyal forces storm a building and overcome mutinous police units, president reports.

President Heydar A. Aliyev of Azerbaijan said Friday that government troops had quelled an attempted coup d’etat by storming a building where about 700 mutinous police were barricaded, overwhelming the rebels and fatally wounding their leader.

According to reports reaching Moscow, at least 30 people were killed and 60 wounded in a fierce firefight that began at 2 a.m. Friday and raged for nine hours on the outskirts of Baku, the capital of the oil-rich but unstable Caucasus nation of 7 million.

Aliyev, in a nationally televised address that capped five days of unrest, said both sides had suffered “numerous casualties” and that civilians had also perished.

Officials said the rebel leader, former Deputy Interior Minister Rovshan Javadov, died of gunshot wounds on the way to the hospital.

The State Department has warned Americans against traveling to Azerbaijan and recommended that citizens who are there stay indoors. Some embassies and multinational firms began evacuating employees from Baku.

“I’m sending all our nonessential people out,” Ian MacGregor, logistics manager for British Petroleum-Statoil, told the Associated Press. But the capital was reported to be calm Friday evening.

At the start of the police mutiny two days earlier, Aliyev had canceled a trip to Pakistan and warned that “Azerbaijan is again on the brink of a civil war.”

He charged Friday that Javadov, backed by three former Azerbaijani leaders now living in Moscow, had been planning to try to seize control of the presidential palace, the Parliament building and television and police headquarters.

Aliyev said Javadov, reputed to be an organized crime “godfather,” had “fallen victim to his own dirty deeds.”

National Security Minister Namik Abbasov told a Cabinet meeting that the rebels “planned to seize the president and kill him.”

Opposition leaders and political analysts said the rebellion was a pure power struggle, a natural outgrowth of the organized crime, corruption and clan strife that has plagued Azerbaijan in the nearly four years since independence.

“This is not an attempted coup d’etat,” said Leila Yunusova, chairwoman of the Independent Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, one of 34 opposition parties. “This is a rebellion by a mafia group that is trying to expand its sphere of influence.”

Yunusova warned that Aliyev, a 71-year-old former member of the Soviet Politburo who has cracked down on internal dissent since coming to power in June, 1993, would use the rebellion as a pretext for “another big wave of repression against the political opposition.”

She said none of the opposition had supported the mutiny by the police unit.

The rebel leader Javadov had founded the Unit of Police Special Forces, better known by its acronym OPON, and his brother, Makhir Javadov, was one of its commanders.

Last October, on Javadov’s orders, members of the 3,000-strong OPON took Azerbaijan’s chief prosecutor hostage and demanded the resignation of key presidential allies, including the Speaker of Parliament.

Aliyev described the incident as an attempted putsch and fired Prime Minister Suret Guseinov, whom he accused of plotting with Javadov.

But Javadov eventually sided with Aliyev and was allowed to stay as deputy interior minister.

There were persistent reports, however, that OPON was involved in illegal exports of copper, nickel and other strategic metals--perhaps competing with members of Aliyev’s own entourage, who were allegedly involved in the same lucrative activities.

“Some of the OPON people had been engaged in some shady export deals for a considerable time,” said Tair R. Aslanly, spokesman for the Azerbaijani government information center in Moscow. “Their illegal commercial activity had gotten completely out of control lately. . . . They had been warned many times to stop.”

Aliyev’s patience apparently snapped after Javadov two weeks ago publicly accused his government of corruption and clan-based favoritism.

On Sunday, an illegal shipment of 150 tons of copper--allegedly under the protection of OPON units--was intercepted at a checkpoint on the Azerbaijani border. OPON retaliated by taking over government offices in two towns in northern Azerbaijan.

The interior minister then ordered OPON disbanded, but its officers mutinied. They were barricaded in their headquarters in a densely populated neighborhood five miles outside Baku, demanding that Aliyev and the Speaker of Parliament resign, when government troops were ordered to storm their site.

Neighbors were apparently caught in the ensuing cross-fire.

Makhir Javadov apparently escaped and was being sought by authorities Friday. By evening, his brother Rovshan’s body had not been found in any of the city’s hospitals or morgues, according to the Azerbaijan News Service.

This week’s turmoil was the third rebellion inside Azerbaijan in less than three years.

Abulfez Elchibey, the nation’s first elected president, was forced to flee in June, 1993, after troops loyal to Guseinov battled government forces in Gyanja and began marching on Baku. Guseinov himself fled to Moscow after the OPON mutiny last October.