Tbilisi, Georgia - Georgian police said a policeman was killed Thursday at the start in the energetic debacle of a protest outside the building, where protesters were to block a parade of the celebration of the independence push requires them that the President resign from Parliament.
Spokesman of the Ministry of the Interior Chota Utiashvili said that the police officer died after being beaten by a car containing organizers of the event travelling near the site of the confrontation between police and protestors about 1 500.
The demonstrators have been claiming the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili and had planned to spend later Thursday in a square close to try to block a military parade marking the country's independence day.
Utiashvili said that 19 other police officers were hospitalized in shock, in which police fired teargas the demonstrators with water cannon. The leaders of the protest said dozens of protesters were arrested, but there was no immediate official figure.
Demonstrations against Saakashvili began Saturday, but attracted a few thousand people at most. Leaders of protests, in the hope to assemble a protest mass and dramatic, had to jump from a building in a nearby square through which the military parade was to pass later Thursday of the Parliament.
But their demonstration permit expired at midnight Wednesday and a few minutes after that time have been exhausted, police moved in on the crowd, spraying water on them and leave off the coast of tear gas. Some witnesses have said police also fired rubber bullets.
Utiashvili said authorities had offered the protesters sites alternate Thursday demo which would not prevent the parade, but that protest leaders refused.
One of the opposition, failure of the former world champion Nona Gaprindashvili, said dozens of protesters were arrested.
Saakashvili were severe and criticism from abroad in 2007 after police repression of violent demonstrations, which damaged his image as a democratic reformer. Dissatisfaction with him rose again after brief war the Georgia with the Russia in 2008, in which the Russia advanced far in Georgian territory and the Georgia entirely lost control of two pro-Russian separatist regions.
But weeks of protests in the spring of 2009 is not his resignation from the force and the opposition, weakened by factional conflict, seems unable to galvanize people in numbers similar to tens of thousands who came to the streets in the revolution of the Rose who helped bring Saakashvili to power in 2003.
