Bodyguards cover Polish President Lech Kaczyński, second left, and and his Georgian counterpart Mikhail Saakashvili, not seen, shortly after shots were fired at their motorcade, near the breakaway province of South Ossetia, close to Akhalgori, Georgia, Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008. Saakashvili has blamed Russian troops for the gunfire. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there was no gunfire from Russian or South Ossetian positions and suggested Georgia engineered the incident to discredit Russia and South Ossetia, Russian news agencies reported.(AP Photo/Irakly Gedenidze, Presidential Press Service, Pool)
Photo: AP
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Polish Special Services Found Unwanted Facts
// According to them, the Georgian party allowed President Lech Kaczyński to be shot at
Mikhail Saakashvili accused of provocation
A big scandal concerning the shelling of the Georgian and Polish presidential escorts on the South Ossetian border has been stirred up. Yesterday influential Polish newspaper Dziennik quoted extracts from a report on investigation carried out in connection with the incident by two Polish special services — the Interior Security Agency (ABW) and the Government Protection Bureau (BOR). The special services came to a conclusion that the incident was a provocation, initiated by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
Polish special services’ five-page report reads that the Sunday shooting was most likely initiated by Georgians. This conclusion was made basing on a number of facts. When the first burst of submachine-gun fire sounded, the Georgian President’s guard did not react to it, and Mikhail Saakashvili remained “relaxed and cheerful.” The report’s authors draw attention to one more strange fact: ahead of the incident the minibus with journalists accompanying the presidents (which was at the end of the column) was allowed to pass forward — as though to deliberately let the media record better what would happen. According to BOR head General Marian Janicki, it contradicts generally accepted rules since there can be no other car at the head of a presidential column. The report’s authors consider that the incident played into Mr. Saakashvili’s hands: on the fifth anniversary of the rose revolution he wanted to distract attention from Georgia’s internal problems and make everyone say that Russia does not fulfill the provisions of the Medvedev-Sarkozy agreement occupying Georgian territories.
Nevertheless, South Ossetia’s authorities denied the assumption that it was Georgians that shot. Tskhinvali admitted that its border guards had to use force to prevent the Georgian escort from entering the republic’s territory. Therefore the ABW presumes that Ossetians or Russians could shoot, and the burst of submachine-gun fire could be accidental — although the authors of the report do not regard this version as highly probable.
ABW head Kszisztof Bondarik distributed the report’s copies among the sixteen most influential officials in the country, including the president, the prime minister, the heads of security agencies and ministries, as well as the chairpersons of the Seim and the Senate. According to Grzegorz Schetyna, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister (who also received a copy of the document), the investigation may result in the presidential bodyguard chief’s resignation. The Interior Minister believes that the presidential security guard could know about the preparation of the incident back onboard the plane which brought Lech Kaczyński to Tbilisi; however he undertook no measures to ensure adequate protection of the head of state. Moreover, during “the improvised trip” to the border with South Ossetia the BOR was ostensibly accidentally cut off from President Kaczyński by almost three hundred meters.
The article by Dziennik has drawn wide response. Yesterday Kommersant received an official letter from the ABW, which reads, “In connection with the article in newspaper Dziennik, where journalists Mikhal Mayevsky and Pavel Reshka used the ABW report’s classified provisions, the Interior Security Agency will demand from the Prosecutor General a full inquiry into their actions, which can be regarded as official secrecy divulgence.”
Vladimir Vodo, Warsaw
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 27, 2008
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