GEORGIA: CAR BOMB EXPLOSION DESTROYS A POLICE STATION AND KILLS THREE POLICEMAN IN GORI

Record ID: 358545

  • Title: GEORGIA: CAR BOMB EXPLOSION DESTROYS A POLICE STATION AND KILLS THREE POLICEMAN IN GORI
  • Date: 1st February 2005
  • Summary: (EU) GORI, GEORGIA (FEBRUARY 1, 2005) (REUTERS) 1. WIDE OF SCENE AROUND BOMBED POLICE STATION/ VARIOUS OF POLICE AND SECURITY AT THE SCENE (4 SHOTS) 0.27 2. WS: GEORGIA'S INTERIOR MINISTER IVANE MERABISHVILI AT THE SCENE OF BLAST 0.34 3. SLV: MERABISHVILI AND OFFICIALS INSPECTING THE SCENE OF THE BLAST 0.40 4. VARIOUS OF DAMAGE CAU
  • Embargoed: 16th February 2005 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: GORI, GEORGIA
  • Country: Georgia
  • Reuters ID: LVA2DZME26GSW0VHR07R8LTUSH0N
  • Story Text: Car bomb kills three policemen in Georgia.


    A car bomb killed three policemen in Georgia on
    Tuesday (February 1) and destroyed their police station
    in what the government called a "terrorist act".

    Only the outside walls of the burnt-out police headquarters
    remained standing in the town of Gori, around 80 km (50 miles)
    to the west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

    "We can say that this is a terrorist act," Interior Minister
    Ivane Merabishvili told reporters at the scene.

    It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, which
    happened just a few kilometres (miles) outside the breakaway
    region of South Ossetia.


    But South Ossetia's separatist leadership, which is resisting attempts
    by central government in the southern Caucasus republic to bring the
    region back under its control, denied any link to the blast.

    The blast happened just minutes after the chief of the regional police,
    Aleko Sukhitashvili, had left the building.

    Injured passers-by and police were taken to hospital, some in a serious
    condition. Police experts were working at the scene, where bits of the car as well as body fragments littered the ground.

    Gori, the hometown of late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was the scene
    of some minor clashes after a mainly peaceful revolution a year ago, when now-president Mikhail Saakashvili's supporters overthrew the government of president Eduard Shevardnadze.

    Before President Saakashvili's accession to power in 2004 there were
    frequent incidents of violence blamed on criminal gangs that thrived on the chaos generated by civil war in the 1990s.


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