Georgia pays respects to victims of Abkhazia War
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The bodies of over a dozen victims who fought and died for Georgia's territorial integrity in the 1992-1993 war in breakaway Abkhazia region will be buried with military honours at a Tbilisi cemetery tomorrow.
The ceremony will pay homage to 17 individuals killed during the conflict that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of military service members, paramilitary combatants and civilians.
These 17 victims were among 60 people identified through DNA analysis over the past two years after their remains were recovered from various graves in Abkhazia since May 2014.
The 17 bodies were taken from the DNA analysis bureau to the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi earlier today for memorial service before being buried at Dighomi Cemetery in the capital on Thursday.
A gravestone of one of the victims of the Babushera Airport tragedy, which remained unidentified as recently as 2015.
The other 43 bodies identified using DNA testing were recovered earlier from the Babushera Cemetery and buried.
They were all identified as victims of the September 22, 1993 incident when their civilian airliner was shot down by Russian-backed rebels while attempting to land at Babushera Airport in Abkhazia's regional capital Sokhumi.
See Agenda.ge's multimedia story about the victims and survivors of the Babushera tragedy here.
Since 2014 more than 40 unidentified bodies have been recovered from the region during search and recovery missions facilitated by the international humanitarian aid group Red Cross.
The bodies of 12 more Georgians found in a mass grave in Abkhazia, at Sokhumi’s Babushera Airport have been identified and will today finally rest in peace at the Tbilisi Brothers’ Military Cemetery.
The bodies of 10 Georgians found in a mass grave in Abkhazia have been identified and returned to their loved ones for an honourable burial. All of the victims were military servants who lost their lives in a war in Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia region 23 years ago.
The bodies of 12 Georgians found in mass grave in Abkhazia, at Sokhumi’s Babushera Airport have been identified and returned to their loved ones for an honourable burial.
Georgian Ministry of Refugees officials and representatives of the de-facto Abkhazian government met today under the auspices of the International Red Cross Commission where they discussed issues relating to the searching and transferring of bodies of those missing since the Georgia-Abkhazian conflict in the early 1990s.
The man who blew himself up in Sokhumi, the capital of Georgia’s break-away Abkhazia region on Monday, was a Russian citizen, reports Russian media.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) chaired a meeting regarding the search for people who went missing during the 1992-93 armed conflict in Abkhazia on December 4, in Yerevan.
Thirty-six graves are planned to be opened in Georgia’s occupied Abkhazia region, in western Georgia this year to take DNA samples and try to identify the individuals.
The remains of 13 individuals who went missing during the 1992-93 armed conflict in Georgia’s Russia-occupied region of Abkhazia have been laid to rest. The bodies of six servicemen and seven civilians were identified through the cooperation of Georgia’s State Ministry for Reconciliation and the International Red Cross Committee.