Public Defender Reports on Killings, Destruction in Buffer Zone Villages

Georgian Public Defender’s Office (PDO) released an interim report based on, as it put it, monitoring of the situation of 31 villages in the areas south from the South Ossetian administrative border, which are currently occupied by the Russian troops.

It said that total of 49 civilians have been killed in those villages. “About two dozen out of them, including women, elderly people and disabled people (blind and deaf) have been killed with brutality,” the report reads.

According to the report a total of 1,200 houses in those villages have been partially or heavily damaged.

Meanwhile, the Georgian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on September 13 that South Ossetian militias were continuing ethnic cleansing of the Georgian villages in the breakaway region. It said that militias “burned to ashes” houses of ethnic Georgians in the villages of Koshka and Dilegi and forced locals to flee their villages after pouring six of them with kerosene demanding to leave.

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