Georgia: South Ossetia Tried to Bomb Tbilisi NATO Office

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

The alleged bomb from an Abkhazia-originated Russian terror plot.

Georgia's Interior Ministry says it stopped a terror plot, hatched by Russian security forces in South Ossetia, to set off a bomb in Tbilisi's NATO liaison office. According to their account, it doesn't seem that NATO was a target per se, but that the suspect, one Badri Gogiashvili, was told to bomb whatever international building he could find:

According to the testimony of Gogiashvili, he was ordered by Aleksei Sokolov, deputy head of Russian FSB Border Troops stationed in Akhalgori, Vladimer Pukhaev, head of Akhalgori Militia Division, and Vova Kibilov, employee of Akhalgori Militia, to find the buildings in Tbilisi with flags of either European Union, United States, or any international organization. From the data collected by Badri Gogiashvili, the mentioned persons chose the building where NATO Liaison Office is located. They ordered Badri Gogiashvili to detonate the bomb near the NATO Liaison Office Gogiashvili was promised USD 2000 for this terrorist act.

South Ossetian officials, meanwhile, deny the claim and say that the alleged ringleader Pukhaev doesn't even exist. Vyacheslav Sedov, head of the South Ossetian government press service, says the allegations are an attempt to involve NATO in the ongoing conflict between Tbilisi and Tskhinvali:

[T]he reason of the "terrorist hysteria» is obvious and testifies aspiration of the official Tbilisi to distract the attention of the public from the internal political problems of Georgia. «Georgia again has tried " to drag the "imaginary terrorist threat from South Ossetia to the objects and representatives of the NATO, to show the Republic in unfavorable light in the opinion of the West», - he has underlined. And it is not casual, according to Sedov, that this information has been spread while in Geneva the next round of the international discussions on safety and stability in Transcaucasia is taking place «It is the next evidence of unwillingness of Georgia to solve the problem peacefully», - the head of the press-service has concluded.

This is on the heels of a similar alleged plot thwarted a few days earlier, this time originating from Abkhazia. In this case it wasn't clear what the target was -- but the bomber said she was going to get USD 3,000 to 5,000.

So is this a concerted effort by Russian forces to create havoc among international organizations in Georgia, or a concerted PR effort by the Georgia government to gin up the Russian threat against NATO? So far, no word from NATO.