|
Home>News Center>World | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Bomb kills 3 police officers in Georgia
A car bomb exploded Tuesday outside a police station in Georgia, killing three policemen, injuring nearly two dozen others and raising fears of renewed violence in the nearby breakaway region of South Ossetia.
The blast in the town of Gori shattered windows in the three-story regional police headquarters, leaving a 10-feet-wide crater in the street. The police headquarters houses a jail, and relatives of its inmates were demanding to be allowed inside to make sure the prisoners were unharmed.
"This was not a random occurrence," Defense Minister Irakly Okruashvili said. "We are dealing with a well organized terrorist act."
No group immediately claimed responsibility.
Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said authorities had determined who owned the car used in the attack.
President Mikhail Saakashvili said "enemies of peace" intended to "disturb the economic progress Georgia has made and the further strengthening of the Georgian state."
"We will show them that they cannot frighten us and Georgia will never be brought to its knees," Saakashvili said.
Gori is the capital of Georgia's Shida Kartli region, which neighbors South Ossetia, home mainly to ethnic Ossetians. Separatist wars in the early 1990s resulted in South Ossetia and another separatist region breaking away.
Since his election in January 2004, Saakashvili has vowed to reunite Georgia, and constant tension between South Ossetia and the central government flared into deadly violence last summer. |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
