Guja Chumburidze, an unemployed 26-year-old resident, was one of those who fell victim to the wrath of rampaging South Ossetian irregulars, who were able to enter the town as their Russian allies advanced into undisputed Georgian territory.

With his two-month-old son and his ageing mother Iamze, Guja cowered in his home on the outskirts of Gori, listening to the sounds of breaking glass and bursts of gunfire as the irregulars embarked on drunken looting sprees.

Then everything went quiet. Refusing to listen to the pleas of his mother, Guja ventured outside to see if it was safe to look for food.

Within seconds, he was stopped by a gang of looters. They had seen him, they said, on the streets of Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital. He was a war criminal and a looter and there was only one punishment for looters and war criminals.

“They beat him until he fell to the ground,” said Iamze, who had rushed onto the street to plead for her son’s life. “They shot him in the back of the head.”

Most of the Ossetians, as well as the Chechen irregulars who joined them, were more interested in pillaging, as evidenced by smashed in windows of Gori’s shops, restaurants and banks or robbing motorists of their cars at gunpoint. South Ossetia has long doubled as Georgia’s principal stolen car market.

But many, according to witnesses whose accounts have yet to be verified, also went house-to-house in Georgian villages, both in South Ossetia and outside the breakaway province, on raping and murdering sprees.

Last week, until orders came from Moscow to rein them in, the Russian troops occupying Georgian territory either did little to stop the irregulars from looting or committing atrocities or actively encouraged them.