Newspaper: Alleged Gori Blast Mastermind is a Mercenary

The Georgian daily Rezonansi published its own probe into the identity of Anatoly Sysoev, who Georgia’s Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said was an agent of Russian military intelligence and the mastermind behind the February 1 blast in Gori that killed three policemen.

According to Rezonansi, Anatoly Sysoev was born in 1950 in Tbilisi and served in the Soviet, and then Russian military intelligence (GRU). In 1992 he officially resigned from service, but left for Azerbaijan the same year and participated in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1992-1995 as a head of field intelligence of the Azerbaijani field artillery.

In 1995 Sysoev was arrested by Azerbaijan charges of high treason, though he had accepted Ukrainian citizenship by that time. Azerbaijani police implicated Sysoev in an attempt to assassinate then Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliev by blowing up his airplane with an “IGLA” man-portable anti-aircraft missile (NATO specification SA-16 and SA-18). He was sentenced to a 15-year jail sentence, which was later reduced to 10 years. In 2001 he was granted amnesty and left for Ukraine. The Baku-based newspaper Echo reported on this release.

Sysoev returned to the region in 2002 as a military advisor to South Ossetian president Eduard Kokoev.

Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili noted that the suspects detained in connection to the Gori blast say Sysoev was training a group of approximately 120 saboteurs in South Ossetia. He also said the members of that group were in possession of at least four “IGLA” anti-aircraft missiles.

Georgia’s Interior Ministry has not commented on whether the man whose biography was published by Rezonansi is the same suspect mentioned in the ministry’s dispatches. 

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