Georgia, Russia deadlocked over mystery missile strike
Pastor Dale Morgan
Georgia, Russia deadlocked over mystery missile strike*
AFP - Thursday, August 9
TBILISI (AFP) - - Moscow strongly denied on Thursday that a Russian jet
was involved in a missile strike on Georgian territory, as the
government in Tbilisi backed the allegation with calls for an emergency
UN Security Council meeting.
From the Georgian capital, Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili engaged
in a round of telephone diplomacy to rally support for a United Nations
Security Council session to discuss the incident.
"The Georgian foreign ministry is working very actively to obtain
adequate international support over this missile incident, and the
minister held a series of conversations with his foreign counterparts,"
foreign ministry spokeswoman Nino Kijaia told AFP.
The 4.8 metre (15.7-foot) missile landed in a field some 50 kilometres
(30 miles) from the Georgian capital Tbilisi on Monday.
It caused no injuries, but Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili
accused Russia of deliberately firing on Georgia, raising the stakes in
already tense relations between the pro-Western Caucasus country and its
former master.
Russia has been infuriated by ex-Soviet Georgia's preparations to join
the Western-led NATO military alliance, regarding the move as an
incursion into its historical sphere of influence.
Moscow continued on Thursday to reject Georgian claims that a Russian
jet had entered Georgian air space and released the missile.
Senior air force officer Igor Khvorov told journalists in Moscow "we
didn't plan or carry out any flights over Georgian territory.... It's
fairly difficult to talk about the flight because there was none."
The continent's main security and democracy body, the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, made a call for all sides to
cooperate in investigating the missile incident, seeming to imply that
Moscow had been less than forthcoming.
An OSCE statement urged "an inclusive investigation" with "participation
of all implicated parties."
Meanwhile the United States said it was looking into the incident.
Such "provocations need to end," a State Department spokesman, Sean
McCormack, warned.
Meanwhile an unnamed Russian foreign ministry official, quoted by
Interfax, said that a United Nations Security Council session would be
"inexpedient."
"What is important is to carry out a painstaking investigation to work
out who stands behind this incident," said the official.
In Georgia, the head of a Russian peacekeeping force that spent
Wednesday examining the site of the strike accused the Georgian side of
removing the missile before peacekeepers could get there.
"When the monitoring group arrived on the scene all the main parts of
the missile had been taken away by the Georgian side," he was quoted by
RIA Novosti as saying.
Russia's Kommersant newspaper quoted an expert in Russian weaponry, the
deputy head of the Raduga weapons company, Vitaly Larionov, who cast
doubt on the Georgians' claims and said that the X-58 type of missile
involved was part of the armoury of several ex-Soviet states, not just
Russia.