A man suspected of throwing a hand grenade at United States President George Bush was arrested in Georgia on Wednesday night, but not before he shot dead a police officer involved in the hunt.
Interior ministry officials said the man had been cornered in a suburb of the capital Tbilisi and a shootout ensued in which the policeman was killed and another wounded.
The suspect was also wounded in the clash in the Vashli-Jvari district, and escaped into nearby woods. Dozens of police combed the area and later emerged with the suspect, who was covered in blood, news reports from Tbilisi said.
”As a result of an exchange of fire, started by the young suspect, one of the anti-terrorism officers has been killed and the suspect himself was wounded,” the interior minister, Vano Merabishvili, told reporters.
Rustavi-2 television showed pictures of a dark-haired man being hustled into a police vehicle by officers.
The live grenade landed 30m away from the podium where Bush was addressing tens of thousands of Georgians on May 10. On Monday the authorities released four photographs of the suspect, taken from TV footage of the address.
They showed a man in his late 20s, wearing a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses, together with a trimmed beard. He has not been named, but a reward was offered for information leading to his capture.
It was not clear on Wednesday night if this offer had led to the armed clash.
The grenade-throwing incident was only disclosed by US authorities once Bush had left Georgia.
It blighted a landmark visit, the first by the US president to one of three former Soviet Union states to have undergone a protest-led regime change in the space of 18 months.
Georgian police initially dismissed the device as a mock-up. They said that, even if it had not been deflected by a girl in the crowd and missed the podium, it had been disarmed and was harmless.
But that claim was contradicted by FBI experts who said preliminary tests of the grenade had shown it was live and had only missed detonating because the activation device had deployed too slowly.
There has been speculation that pro-western Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the rose revolution, was the intended target. – Guardian Unlimited Â