President Boris Yeltsin's personal guards acknowledged Monday that they were the masked, armed men who seized a Moscow skyscraper Friday afternoon, choking rush-hour traffic and severely beating several bank guards.


After the president's Security Service had for two days denied any involvement in the incident, a spokeswoman said Kremlin guards had indeed surrounded the former Comecon building in which MOST-Bank has its headquarters.


The entire incident was a "misunderstanding" that only through good fortune did not lead to bloodshed, said Yelena Zhuravlyova.


She said Yeltsin's motorcade had been joined by a group of heavily armed men while traveling along Uspenskoye Shosse in Western Moscow on Friday. The president's guards had followed the vehicles to MOST-Bank's Novy Arbat headquarters and demanded their identification. When they refused, the standoff had followed.


MOST-Bank tells a different story: Friday morning, bank president Vladimir Gusinsky was in his own motorcade on Uspenskoye Shosse, riding to work from his country home. A MOST-Bank spokeswoman said four foreign-made cars had trailed him all the way to his office and parked next to the building.


What is certain is that a confrontation between the presidential guards and the MOST-Bank guards developed into an all out brawl that blocked a major downtown intersection, injured at least six people and, according to MOST-Bank, sent two to the hospital. All the while, police and counterintelligence forces stood by and watched.


"If, for five hours, people without any identification can take hold of a major building -- and no one tries to stop them -- what can you say?" asked Tatyana Brylyakova, the MOST-Bank spokeswoman.Here is how Brylyakova described Friday's events: Gusinsky arrived at work surrounded by his usual security escort. The four cars trailing him parked next to the building at 36 Novy Arbat. From his office, Gusinsky called the city's Department of Organized Crime and asked them to investigate. They did, but the men in the four cars said they were from "a state organization," and told the investigators to get lost.


Next, Gusinsky placed another call, this one to the Moscow division of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, known as the FSK. They, too, dispatched a squad to investigate.


"They had an unfriendly conversation and one of the unidentified men took a wicked shot at the wheel of the FSK car," Brylyakova said. The FSK left.


The real trouble began at about 5:30 P.M., when three buses carrying about 30 armed men in masks pulled up to the former COMECON headquarters. They were Yeltsin's security officers, but they had no identifying emblems on their fatigues.


"Our guards demanded they show their weapons permits," said Zhuravlyova, spokeswoman for the president's security service. "But they refused and resisted. Thank God there were no victims." MOST-Bank spokeswoman Brylyakova, however, said the head of the bank's security, Ivan Litvinenko, remained hospitalized Monday in critical condition, after his kidneys were severely damaged in the beating he had sustained.


Over the weekend, Yeltsin called for an investigation of the incident after Gusinsky and the Association of Russian Banks both clamored for an inquiry. The Presnenskaya Regional Prosecutor's Office also opened a criminal investigation at Gusinsky's behest.


On Monday, Brylyakova said Gusinsky's investigation, which had been transferred from the local level all the way to the federal level, was shut down by acting Prosecutor General Alexei Ilyushenko.


"He asked for the investigation, and then closed the case and destroyed the files," she said.


A spokesman for Ilyushenko denied that accusation and said the Prosecutor General was not involved in the case. That account, however, contradicts a report from the city prosector's office that says Ilyushenko did ask to take the case over.


Brylyakova said there was no way Gusinsky's escort could have been suspected of interfering in the president's motorcade. She said the government knows Gusinsky travels that highway with guards.


"For more than a year we've had permission to travel that route with armed guards," Brylyakova said. "And they're well aware of that."