South Ossetian Minister Speaks of Georgian Trail in Beslan

In an interview with the Russian news agency Regnum published on August 7, Interior Minister of breakaway South Ossetia Mikhail Mindzaev said that Chechen rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov (killed in March) visited Tbilisi and met with Georgian officials shortly before the terrorist act in Russia?s North Ossetian town of Beslan last September, when hundreds of children died in a terrorist siege. Russia says Basayev and Maskhadov were behind the Beslan terrorist act.

?I do not want to make a statement about it, as an investigation is uderway? But there is information that Basayev visited Tbilisi three weeks before the terrorist act in Beslan; two weeks earlier Aslan Maskhadov was also visiting Tbilisi? Today I will not specify the names of those whom they met in Tbilisi,? Mindzaev said.

This is Mindzaev’s second such statement. In an interview with Regnum on July 27 the interior minister of the breakaway region said: “We know that the terrorist act in Beslan was organized from Tbilisi. We know who met with whom, when and where in Georgia before the Beslan tragedy.”

These statements come on the heals of an announcement of the Georgian Interior Ministry according to which a car bomb explosion in the Georgian town of Gori on February 1, 2005, which killed three policemen, was organized by a group of saboteurs trained by Russian military intelligence forces in South Ossetia.

Georgian State Minister for Conflict Resolution Issues Giorgi Khaindrava said on July 28 while commenting on Mindzaev?s first statement that “Beslan is not an issue for political wrangling.”

This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian)