Interior Ministry of Georgia has dispatched investigators to the Kodori Gorge to examine witness reports that a plane believed to be violating Georgian airspace was shot down.
Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili, who spoke to RFE/RL from a site in the Kodori region in Upper Abkhazia, confirmed "warning shots" were fired at a plane that entered Georgia's airspace on the evening of August 21. He could not confirm, however, whether the plane was hit.
Utiashvili said ministry officials are now questioning local residents claiming to have heard an explosion and seen smoke at what they believed was the crash site.
"Many local residents in Kodori Gorge saw the plane, and some of them let us know that they also heard sound of an explosion -- which, they think, could have been of the plane exploding," Utiashvili said. "We have not discovered any part of a plane, therefore we can't confirm this explosion. We're examining the site where traces [of the alleged explosion] are believed to be located."
Georgian officials have alleged that it was a Russian plane that entered Georgian airspace. Russian air force spokesman Aleksandr Drobyshevsky has dismissed the claim as the latest "provocation" against Russia.
Incursion Tracked
On August 22, Georgia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement published on its official website that a fighter jet flying from Russia twice violated Georgian airspace on August 21.
Georgian antiaircraft systems tracked the jet's incursions, which took place in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov, speaking to Reuters, denied the accusation.
The Foreign Ministry statement said an official note of protest demanding an explanation had been sent to Russia's Foreign Ministry.
Georgian Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia said on August 22 that nine such violations had been recorded over the past three months.
The most serious claim came at the beginning of August, when Georgia claimed that a military jet entered its airspace from Russia and dropped or jettisoned a bomb near a village located near Georgia's border with its breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Georgia's claim has been supported by two teams of international experts, but Russia has countered that Georgia fabricated the incident for political reasons.
(RFE/RL, agency reports) - Copyright (c) 2007. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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