MOSCOW, Feb. 3 -- Georgia's prime minister, Zurab Zhvaniya, was found dead early Thursday, apparently killed by carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty gas heater at the apartment of a political colleague and friend, Georgian officials said.
"It is an accident," Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said on Georgian television. "We can say that poisoning by gas took place."
Bodyguards carry a coffin holding the body of the prime minister at his home in Tbilisi, Georgia.
(Zviad Nikolaishvili Via Reuters)
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Zhvaniya, 41, was one of the leaders of the November 2003 Rose Revolution that swept aside the corrupt and exhausted government of Eduard Shevardnadze after elections largely condemned by international observers as fraudulent. In a street revolt that in some ways foreshadowed the recent upheaval in Ukraine, a Western-leaning leadership assumed power.
The prime minister was visiting the apartment of Zurab Usupov, the deputy governor of the Kvemo-Kartli region, who also died.
A gas-fired stove that had been installed two days earlier in Usupov's home in Tbilisi, the capital, malfunctioned in the poorly ventilated apartment, according to Georgian officials and local news reports. Such accidents are not uncommon in Georgia, where erratic electricity supplies in winter force people to use gas heat.
Zhvaniya's security guards grew concerned because they did not hear from him for several hours after he entered the apartment and did not answer his cell phone, officials said. The guards broke into the apartment shortly after 4 a.m. and found the prime minister dead in an armchair in the living room before a table with an open backgammon set on it. Usupov's body was found in the kitchen. Officials said there were no signs of violence.
Preliminary tests indicated that Zhvaniya's blood contained fatal levels of the substance carboxyhemoglobin, according to Levan Samkharauli, a Justice Ministry official, news agencies reported. "That means that the cause of death was carbon monoxide gas," Samkharauli said. An autopsy was ordered, and Georgian prosecutors opened an investigation.
One lawmaker, Amiran Shalamberidze, suggested that the two men might have been murdered. "There is the impression that these tragic facts didn't occur by chance but were the results of interference from the side of certain outside forces," Shalamberidze said, according to the Russian ITAR-Tass news agency, in an apparent reference to Russia.
Asked about the allegation, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in Moscow, "The statements of those who rush to make judgments . . . will remain on their consciences," according to the Russian news agency Interfax.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to his Georgian counterpart, Mikheil Saakashvili. Zhvaniya "was well-known in Russia as a supporter of the development of friendly, good-neighborly relations between the Russian and Georgian peoples," Putin said in a telegram released by the Kremlin.
Relations between Russia and Georgia have been strained over separatist regions within Georgia that have received support from Moscow. Separately, Russia has accused Georgia of tolerating the presence of Chechen terrorists in the country's rugged Pankisi Gorge.
Zhvaniya was regarded as a moderating influence in those disputes and on the sometimes impulsive Georgian president. Earlier this week, he had urged his countrymen to reserve judgment on who was to blame for a car bombing in the city of Gori, near the separatist region of South Ossetia, that killed three policemen.
Although they had worked together closely in the revolution and in government, Saakashvili and Zhvaniya were widely regarded as potential rivals.
On Thursday, Saakashvili assumed the powers of the prime minister until a successor is named. "Georgia has lost a great patriot who devoted his entire life to serving the motherland," the president said. "Zurab's death is a great blow to Georgia and to me personally. I have lost my closest friend, my most loyal adviser, my biggest ally."
Zhvaniya, who was a biologist before he entered politics, is survived by his wife and three children.
