Five men died in a gunfight in the Georgian separatist region of South Ossetia on Sunday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said, the first violence this year in a zone patrolled by a three-sided peacekeeping force, Reuters reported. The spokesman, Guram Donadze, said one Georgian policeman and four South Ossetians died in the village of Kurta, three km (two miles) north of Tskhinvali, the capital of breakaway South Ossetia. The circumstances were unclear. Regional police chief Vladimer Jugeli told Georgia's Rustavi-2 television that he suspected it was an attack launched by South Ossetian volunteer fighters. The tiny Georgian region is not internationally recognised as a state but it has rejected all attempts by Tbilisi to bring it back into the fold, including fighting a separatist war to win de facto independence in 1992. Peacekeepers from Russia, Georgia and the Russian region of North Ossetia now keep watch over the region while the search for a political solution continues. Georgia has accused Russia of backing rebels in the region, as well as in another separatist zone, Abkhazia. The dispute over South Ossetia flared into violence last year, but a Georgian plan to grant the region broad autonomy in January calmed things down.
