TBILISI, Georgia -- Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze has postponed his departure for a European security summit after gunmen shot dead a senior politician and badly wounded another, Tbilisi radio said.


Shevardnadze was due to leave Sunday for a two-day meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe opening in Budapest on Monday. But on Saturday the radio quoted him as saying he would arrive late, if at all.


Security officials met Saturday to discuss the attack, in which a police spokesman said opposition leader Georgy Chanturia was killed and his wife, a former deputy prime minister, suffered bullet wounds.


Chanturia, 35, the head of the moderate opposition National Democratic Party, was fatally wounded when gunmen raked his car with bullets near his home in central Tbilisi on Saturday morning, Interior Ministry spokesman Valerian Gogolashvili said.


Witnesses said at least five gunmen in two cars opened fire as Chanturia and his wife were leaving for party headquarters. The attackers sped away in a car with no numberplates before police arrived.


Chanturia died on the way to hospital from multiple gunshot wounds. His wife Irina Sarishvili was in serious condition with gunshot wounds to the stomach, police said. Their driver and a bodyguard were also wounded.


Shevardnadze condemned the killing in a statement, calling Chanturia "my young friend and one of the most prominent figures of democratic Georgia."


He called the assassination the latest in a "wave of terror against democratic Georgia," accusing unnamed forces of trying to destabilize the country.


Chanturia, a historian, became a dissident in the Soviet era. He bitterly opposed Georgia's nationalist former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who imprisoned Chanturia for three months until Gamsakhurdia himself was overthrown.


Chanturia's party was later at odds not only with Shevardnadze, whom he initially backed, but also with militant and radical opposition groups.


No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Chanturia's party issued a statement blaming "Russian imperialist forces and Georgian anti-democratic mafia forces."


Sarishvili, 34, a member of parliament, served briefly as deputy prime minister in 1993 before resigning.


(Reuters, AP)