Car bomb in Georgia kills 3 police

A car bomb exploded outside a police station in former Soviet Georgia on Tuesday, killing three police and destroying the building in what officials called a “terrorist act.”

Only the outside walls remained of the burnt-out police headquarters in the town of Gori, some 50 miles to the west of the capital Tbilisi.

“As a result of today’s terrorist act — and we can definitely say it was a terrorist act — three policemen died and 15 people were seriously injured,” Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili told reporters at the site.

It was not clear who was behind the bombing, which happened just a few miles outside the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

'Enemies of peace'
President Mikhail Saakashvili said the bombers wanted to derail tentative peace moves between Tbilisi and the breakaway regime, which is tacitly backed by neighbor Russia.

“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.”

Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili said the bombing was planned outside Georgia, but did not say where.

South Ossetia’s separatist leadership, which is resisting attempts by central government in the southern Caucasus republic to bring the region back under its control, denied any link to the blast.

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“What happened is terrible. We hope this won’t be repeated. We definitely aren’t guilty of it,” Irina Gagloyeva, spokeswoman for the separatist leadership, told Rustavi-2 television.

The blast happened just minutes after the chief of the regional police, Aleko Sukhitashvili, had left the building.

Injured passers-by and police were taken to the local hospital, some in a serious condition. Police experts were working at the scene, where bits of the car as well as body fragments littered the ground.

Gori, the hometown of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was the scene of some minor clashes after a mainly peaceful revolution a year ago when Saakashvili’s supporters overthrew the government of president Eduard Shevardnadze.

Before Saakashvili’s accession to power in 2004 there were frequent incidents of violence blamed on criminal gangs that thrived on the chaos generated by civil war in the 1990s.