OSCE Envoy Condemns Dvani Attack that Killed One Policeman
| A snapshot from the Georgian Interior Ministry’s footage of a pickup vehicle hit by mine. |
The Special Representative of the Greek Chairperson-in-Office of the OSCE, Ambassador Charalampos Christopoulos, strongly condemned the March 29 bomb blasts which killed one Georgian policeman and injured six others at the village of Dvani, one kilometer south of the breakaway South Ossetian administrative border.
“Such incidents are further raising tensions in an already fragile environment,” he said in a statement. “The Georgian authorities are still investigating, but there seems little doubt that this was a deliberately targeted attack.”
He also said that the incident underscored the need “to implement swiftly” the incident prevention and response mechanisms which all parties agreed to at the last round of the Geneva discussions.
“They also underline the importance of the presence of the OSCE Military Observers who are able to monitor such incidents and credibly report on them,” he added.
Police pickup type vehicle with 5 policemen exploded on a mine while patrolling area near the village Dvani, which is seven kilometers south-west of the breakaway region’s capital Tskhinvali. Support police car, assisting the wounded police crew, was blown up by a second mine about 15 minutes after the first explosion.
EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM) said the first explosion seemed to be triggered by a trip-wire.
“Thus, attackers did not discriminate between potential victims, but any car could have been hit,” Hansjörg Haber, head of EUMM said in a statement on March 29. “It is an abominable act that the second explosion obviously targeted the people coming to help the victims of the first one.
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