Separatist fighters and Russian troops looted and set homes ablaze in Georgia on Wednesday amid mutual recriminations over breaches of a truce that ended five days of bitter conflict.
| At least they didn't put panties on anybody's head. That would have been intolerable. |
A day after the truce was brokered by France, Russia faced mounting criticism in the West for its military offensive and US President George W. Bush demanded that Russian troops withdraw from Georgia. Russian armoured vehicles patrolled Gori, the flashpoint Georgian town between the capital and South Ossetia, the breakaway Georgian region at the centre of the conflict. Hundreds of South Ossetian rebels with some Russian army personnel went house-to-house in villages near Gori. They torched houses and looted buildings, witnesses said.
The body of a man, his mouth caked with blood, lay in a street in the village of Dzardzanis and nearby the body of a bearded man could be seen crushed under an overturned minivan, an AFP journalist reported. Human Rights Watch said its researchers in South Ossetia had "witnessed terrifying scenes of destruction in four villages that used to be populated exclusively by ethnic Georgians."
Russian tanks have blocked the main highway connecting the rebel region of South Ossetia with the rest of Georgia, the Georgian Foreign Ministry said.
About 100 Georgian special forces, recently returned from Iraq, set up a road block with rocket launchers and other weapons on the main highway from Gori to Tbilisi, about 45 kilometers (30 miles) away. Russia denied its forces were headed for Tbilisi although Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told CNN television he believed Russia wanted to surround the capital. |