By DPA,
Tbilisi : A Georgian policeman was shot dead Wednesday by fire from the direction of a Russian checkpoint near the recently-occupied town of Gori, the interior ministry said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear who opened fire. Russian peacekeepers and Georgian television pointed to South Ossetian militia, but peacekeepers also shed doubt on the veracity of the Georgian report.
“At 10:15 a.m. this morning, shots were fired at a Georgian police post on the edge of the village of Karaleti in Gori district. The shots came from a nearby Russian post,” said the statement sent to journalists through email.
“The Georgian side did not return fire,” it added.
The ministry said the policeman, Kakha Tsotniashvili, died in hospital from bullet wounds to the head and throat.
But sources at the local Russian peacekeepers’ headquarters told Itar-tass news agency they could not confirm the death of the Georgian policeman and had not heard shots fired near their position.
“They said there were people in masks… Russian peacekeepers together with the Georgian policemen have combed the district, but have found no one in the nearby houses,” the news agency quoted a soldier as saying. He added the search was ongoing.
Karaleti lies within the seven-kilometre buffer zone Russian troops have established around Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia where war erupted last month.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged to pull out all troops from the security zones by Oct 1 in peace talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Moscow Monday.
Russia, however, will keep 3,800 troops in each of Georgia’s rebel provinces. Under the peace accord, 200 European monitors will stand in the buffer zones between these troops and Georgia.
On Tuesday, Russian troops pulled out of a Georgian town near the rebel region of Abkhazia in what Tbilisi hailed as the “first sign” of Moscow’s pledge to withdraw from the former Soviet state.
Georgian Rustavi-2 television showed several Russian armoured personnel carriers leaving the village of Ganmukhuri one month after troops seized control of the border region
Russia is bound within a week’s time to leave outstanding checkpoints between Senaki and the Black Sea port of Poti, deep inside Georgia.