Eyewitness report: 'In past few days Tbilisi has turned into a ghost town'

A SCOT on a summer placement in Tbilisi last night told how he had been evacuated in a US embassy bus as Russian bombs exploded ever closer to his flat in the Georgian capital.

David McArdle was speaking to The Scotsman as he waited at the Armenian border for a visa into the country.

"Tbilisi has become unsafe," he said. "There was a bomb this morning just outside the city centre so I thought time was up."

However, the 24-year-old, from Greenock, denied reports that the capital had been coming under sustained attack – he had read them on his laptop in bars on peaceful streets. He said he was concerned about all the misinformation terrifying locals and their families overseas.

The Aberdeen University law graduate, who has a postgraduate diploma in Russian from Glasgow University, said: "Tbilisi is a vibrant, exciting, happy city. It has clearly changed. It has undergone a metamorphosis in the past eight years, economically and socially. But in the past five to six days it has turned into a ghost town.

"People have been conscripted or have decided to move out to the villages where they think there is less of a threat of being bombed."

He said the general belief was the conflict was not about South Ossetia or Abkhazia, the separatist regions, but about a regime change in Georgia.

He decided to leave Tbilisi, where he was working at the European Centre For Minority Issues, after hearing erroneous reports that the international airport had been destroyed.The British Embassy told him to get out but, he said, gave no advice on how to do this. When he went to the office, he found no-one there. Exasperated, he turned to the US for help and was bussed out to Armenia.

Last night, the Foreign Office said its advice remained to leave Georgia unless absolutely necessary.