Jakarta – Police on Wednesday fired volleys of teargas at 2,500 protestors who gathered outside parliament calling on Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid to answer corruption charges or step down.

There were no casualties, an AFP reporter said, and the demonstrators briefly fell back before regrouping on a road running past the main gate of the parliament complex.

Shortly afterwards the elite mobile brigade police, among some 800 police camped at the parliament since Monday, changed tactics and allowed the demonstrators, who included university students, into the complex. Each protestor was frisked before being allowed into an enclosure cordoned off by police with barbed wire inside the grounds of the complex.

The demonstrators began massing outside the parliament at around 10am, and later as many as seven groups were seen numbering around 2,500 people, according to journalists.

Many of them were calling on the president to step down. "Dur, step down – it's not that difficult," read one poster tacked on the barbed wire barricades by a group calling itself the Joint Movement for Anti-corruption". "Step down or be thrown out," read another.

Earlier some of the protestors had said they were not calling for Wahid to go but merely wanted him to answer charges of corruption levelled against him before a parliamentary commission.

"We are not asking him to resign ... we just want the special commission to conduct a full investigation ... we are still giving Gus Dur some time," Indra Gunawan from the People's Solidarity for Democracy told AFP, refering to the president by his nickname.

The commission is seeking to question Wahid over a 3.9 million dollar embezzlement scam allegedly pulled off by his masseur, and the fate of a two million dollar donation from the Sultan of Brunei, which the president claimed was a personal gift.

The allegations of impropriety – dubbed 'Bulogate' and 'Bruneigate' by the press – have been seized on by Wahid's critics in the newly-empowered parliament, who are calling for his resignation.

Wahid, the country's first democratically-elected president, on Tuesday said he would refuse to appear before the commission, but was prepared to meet its members outside the parliament.

On a main flag pole inside the complex, some students from the University of Indonesia, Muhammadiya University and Bandung Institute of Technology had raised a huge banner from the main parliament flagpole, reading: "Uncover the new corruption." Other banners read "Gus Dur – admit your mistakes" and "Support the Bulogate commission."

Jakarta police have had 40,000 men on alert, many of them camped at potential trouble spots around the city, since Monday when the protests had been expected to take place, but failed to materialize.

There was no immediate sign of any pro-Wahid supporters, who last week threatened to descend on the capital en masse if his opponents took to the streets.

Shortly after midday, three members of the commission emerged from the parliament building to address the protestors, who were sitting inside the barbed wire singing, chanting and listening to speeches. "God willing this commission will not bow to pressure," commission chairman Bachtiar Chamsyah said. He added the commission would announce the results of its probe into the two scandals to the parliament on January 24, and to the public at a plenary session of January 29.

However, Chamsyah did not spell out whether the commission had accepted Wahid's proposal to meet its members outside the parliament for questioning, instead of answering their summons.