Participants of trilateral meeting in Ergneti agree to search people who disappeared in 1991-1992

On September 6, the Georgian village of Ergneti hosted a meeting of the Coordination Mechanism to address issues of missing persons. The participants from Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia agreed to include the persons who had disappeared in 1991-1992 into the search mechanism.

"We discussed the issue of searching five missing citizens of South Ossetia: Khachirov, Khugaev, Pliev, Kabisov and Ikaev, who went missing in 2008 during the then military conflict. Our party has some documents on all these persons; and, in our view, the Georgian party fails to undertake measures to find them. We also fixed a decision that the persons who disappeared in 1991-1992 would be included into the search mechanism," said Khokh Gagloity, Deputy Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Republic of South Ossetia for post-conflict settlement.

"We talked about 41 missing people. At the meeting we also discussed a possibility of studying the place of burial in Tamarasheni. But we do not rule out that this place is not the only one – there may be several of them; and we are open for any information about burials from the local population, authorities, mass media and relatives of missing persons," said Askar Umarbekov, a representative of the ICRC.

He added that over the past two years with the help of the ICRC five bodies of missing people were exhumed and identified, "Ekho Kavkaza" reports.

The next meeting is scheduled for March 2013.