Epress.am News from Armenia
Gunmen on Wednesday attacked the vehicle of the leader of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia in an apparent assassination attempt which killed one of his bodyguards, news reports said.
The local official news agency Apsnypress reported that the bodyguard died in hospital after the attack on Abkhaz leader Alexander Ankvab, who was being driven into work in the region’s main city Sukhumi.
Ankvab told Russian agency Interfax that he was unharmed.
“I was not hurt,” he said.
Abkhaz security sources told Interfax that an investigation was underway.
“According to preliminary information, after a land mine placed in the way of the president of Abkhazia’s motorcade exploded, the cars were fired on from a grenade launcher and a machine gun,” an unnamed security source said, AFP reports.
Ankvab, who was Abkhazia’s interior minister from 1992 to 1993, garnered nearly 55 percent of the vote in the election on Aug. 26, 2011, in the tiny mountainous region on the Black Sea coast which declared independence from Georgia in 1999. Tbilisi continues to regard it as a breakaway region, RIA Novosti reports.
This is the fifth assassination attempt on Ankvab in the past five years though none of the cases have so far been solved. Two unsuccessful attacks were carried out in 2005. In 2007, he received a slight concussion and a shrapnel injury to the back when his car came under attack from a grenade launcher. In 2009, Alexander Ankvab was injured when his house came under grenade launcher attack. Ankvab received shrapnel wounds to his arm and leg.