Three police were killed in ex-Soviet Georgia on Tuesday in a car bombing President Mikhail Saakashvili said was a terrorist act to derail peace talks with the nearby breakaway region of South Ossetia. The bomb went off outside the police headquarters in the town of Gori, some 80 km (50 miles) west of the capital Tbilisi. The force of the blast left only the building's burnt-out shell standing with car fragments and body parts scattered outside. The bombing happened just a few kilometres outside South Ossetia, which is backed by Moscow and has run its own affairs since a low-level separatist war in the early 1990s. It was not clear who was behind the attack but Saakashvili said the bombers' aim was to sabotage his proposal, unveiled last week in Strasbourg, for South Ossetia to return to central control but with a large degree of autonomy. "We should not give the enemies of peace the opportunity to wreck the peace process," Saakashvili said after an unscheduled meeting of Georgia's national security council. "What happened (was) an act of political terrorism." Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili told reporters at the scene of the bombing that three police died and 15 people were seriously injured. Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili said the attack was prepared outside Georgia, but did not say where.
