Russia hands 63 peaceful residents of South Ossetia over to Georgia

Today, as a result of negotiations between Georgian officials and Russian militaries, 63 peaceful residents of Georgian villages of South Ossetia have been released.

Earlier, Alexei Malashenko, expert from the Moscow Carnegie Centre, has declared that bargaining for captured Ossetians and Georgians at the local level would only aggravate the situation; in order to normalize it, the Russian command should recognize all those captured in the warfare to be prisoners of war.

"The Russian party has handed 63 persons over to its Georgian counterpart - they are all civilians, residents of the villages located in the Big and Small Liakhv Gorges. They are the citizens of Georgia who failed to escape from the conflict zone prior to the warfare and remained in their houses," reports the press service of the governor of the region named Shida Kartli, noting that these are mainly elderly persons, the oldest of them being 90.

"Some of the released captives have traces of beatings. They say that they received their mutilations when they were captured by Ossetian formations," the press service has reported. According to the captives' stories, for more than 10 days they were kept in the Tskhinvali prison, they received food there and as a whole were normally treated.

"In its turn, in an hour, the Georgian party will hand 8 Ossetians over to the Russian counterpart; one of them is wounded," the press service reports.

Sergey Livantsov, spokesman of the Regional Frontier Department of the Russian FSB (Federal Security Bureau) for the South Federal District (SFD), said that the Georgian party has handed 16 Russians over to Russia at the frontier checkpoint "Verkhni Lars", half of this group are children.

"From the start of operations in South Ossetia, over 70 Russians were returned through this checkpoint," Mr Livantsov told the "Interfax" today, having added that after the start of the warfare in South Ossetia this was already the eighth delivery of Russians by the Georgian party.

Meanwhile, Givi Targamadze, chairman of the parliamentary committee for defence and security, has expressed hope that over a hundred of males, still in Russian captivity, will be released later today.

The head of the parliamentary committee has noted that the Georgian party was also permitted to exhume 45 bodies who, as he said, were mainly military men.