Analyst: Armenian-Modified Grenade thrown During Bush Address

Georgian Military Analyst Irakli Aladashvili wrote in the May 16-22 issue of Kviris Palitra weekly that the hand-grenade thrown during George W. Bush’s public address in Tbilisi was not a Soviet-made RGD-5, as reported earlier, but a slightly bigger, modified version which was produced during and after the Nagorno-Karabakh war in Armenia.

The newspaper published pictures of the grenade, which bear the timestamp of May 10, 2005, 16:58. The grenade itself has the marking: D-100-403. According to the analyst, if the producers of this modified piece used the soviet system of marking, the last two digits indicate the year of production – 2003. The grenade thrown in Tbilisi weighs 310 grams without a fuse while the original RGD-5 weighs the same with the fuse.

The grenade, according to the author, failed to detonate because of a faulty fuse. The grenade’s fuse contains a trigger with a spring, which, when released, hits a capsule-detonator, which, in turn, causes the grenade to explode.

Aladashvili says that the initial investigation shows that the trigger worked, as there is a characteristic denture left at the centre of the detonating capsule by the trigger. The detonating capsule of the KD-8M type has a copper casing and contains quicksilver as a detonating agent. This very capsule failed to detonate, the author speculates, either because it was faulty or because the spring of the trigger proved to be too light.

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