Tales of terror at tense Russian lines in Georgia

GORI, Georgia (Reuters) - Whatever the Russian soldiers manning the checkpoint outside the Georgian town of Gori say, the atmosphere is tense.

On Thursday, a Georgian reporter speaking to camera was shot at here by a hidden gunman down the road from the Russian soldiers, the bullet grazing her arm.

By Friday, elderly Georgians are still trudging out of the abandoned town past the checkpoint, telling of looting and burning in the villages north of Gori by militias from across the Georgian border in Russia's north Caucasus.

Occasionally, small-arms fire rings out from the hills above the road.

A car without license plates carrying bearded men in black approaches the checkpoint from the direction of Gori, pulls up, waits, and turns back. In the dirt on its back window is scrawled the word "Chechnya".

Russian troops have held the ground around this key Georgian town since Wednesday, when they advanced 25 km (15 miles) south from South Ossetia, having driven out Georgian forces that had tried to reassert Tbilisi's control over its breakaway region.

Russia insists it will give back Gori, under a peace plan being delivered to Tbilisi on Friday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But for now the helicopter gunships flying low overhead suggest its grip is still tight.

Refugees, human rights groups and the Georgian authorities allege that renegade militias from across the border have moved in behind the Russian forces, looting and burning homes abandoned by frightened Georgian villagers.

"BURNED ALIVE"

"Many people were burned alive in their homes," said one old Georgian woman, pulling a trolley piled high with bags through the checkpoint.

Refugees tell of a lawless zone in the villages running north from Gori to Tskhinvali, the devastated capital of South Ossetia taken first by Georgian then Russian forces.

There have been several instances of gunmen in military uniform hijacking cars belonging to journalists, as well as the United Nations, at gunpoint.

Moscow says its presence in uncontested Georgian territory is needed to secure Georgian military installations and weapons abandoned in Georgia's pullout.

"We're the regular army," says one soldier, Vita, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his camouflage uniform. "There's no violence, no looting. All is quiet."

Many of the soldiers -- some lounging in the midday sun, others manning tanks and armored personnel carriers -- appear bored.

But one soldier, smoking and eating at the dusty roadside, does talk of looting in the villages.

Another says he spent five years in Chechnya, the Russian region bordering Georgia where separatists fought two wars in the 1990s.

Others say they are based with Russian forces in Dagestan, another patchwork of ethnic groups in the volatile Caucasus.

Two hundred meters (yards) down the road from the Russians, Georgian police wait in white pick-ups wait.

A Georgian government official has twice crossed the lines into Gori in a flak jacket in the past two days, trying to negotiate a handover, but there appears to be little progress.

The old woman with a trolley lashes out at Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who appears not to have foreseen the scale of Russia's counter-offensive.

"Why has this happened?" she asks. "Why did Saakashvili start this war?"

(Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Kevin Liffey)