South Ossetia hosts meeting on search of perished and missing persons

Today, the village of Dvani was the venue of the fourth meeting of the special commission in charge of searching the dead and missing persons with participation of officials from Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia, organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The today's meeting lasted for five hours and was held behind closed doors. It discussed the issue of searching for 44 persons. The Georgian party demands to find and return for reburial 33 persons; of them 12 persons were servants at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defence of Georgia. The others were civilians.

Within the competence of the above commission, the South-Ossetian party is searching for 8 people, and the Russian one - for 3 persons.

Among the cases of the missing people, there are cases taken under control by Thomas Hammarberg, the OSCE High Commissioner on Human Rights. These are the cases of the missing citizens of South Ossetia Alan Khugaev, Alan Khachirov, Soltan Pliev and Radik Ikaev, as well as the crew members of tank No. 406 Georgiy Romelashvili, Zaza Birtvelashvili and Otar Sukhitashvili, who disappeared in August 2008.

As of today, none of the missing persons has been found. It was only last week that the commission, which operates under the auspices of the ICRC, had a positive precedent: on May 5, the South-Ossetian party handed over to the Georgian one the body of Tamara Zambakhidze, who was lost in August 2008.

After the meeting in Dvani, Shota Utiashvili, a representative of the Georgian delegation, said that the exchange of information among the parties would continue; however, the search would be hard. Representative of the President of South Ossetia Boris Chochiev said that if searches for missing citizens of his republic would bring no results, then, further meetings within the framework of this commission will be stopped.