24 November 2008, 12:33
Kaczynski asks not to blame anybody for the incident in Georgia
President of Poland Lech Kaczynski asks not to blame anybody for the incident in Georgia when unknown persons opened fire near the cars, which carried himself and President of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili. According to Mr Kaczynski, it was he who asked to change the route of the presidential cortege.
We remind you that yesterday, on November 23, a car column was shelled in the border with South Ossetia; President of Poland Lech Kaczynski and President of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili were in these cars. This was reported by Polish mass media.
"Risk was required; these were the obligations of President of Poland. In Georgia, all has happened upon my consent. I wasn't afraid," the ITAR-TASS quotes Lech Kaczynski, who said this in the evening on November 23 at the airport of Tbilisi.
As he said, the visit of the territory near the border with South Ossetia was not included into the official schedule of Polish President to Georgia.
Mr Kaczynski did not believe that the incident was staged by Georgians to expose Russia in bad light. As he said, at the moment of shelling he heard people speaking Russian. Answering the question why he had moved in direction of South Ossetia, Polish President said: "In order to get convinced that Russians are in the areas covered by the peaceful plan. They shouldn't be there."
Mikhail Saakashvili, in turn, spoke at the briefing in Tbilisi and said that the shelling was "an improvisation of the Russian party."
Sergey Lavrov, Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, has named the yesterday's incident in the Georgian-South-Ossetian border a provocation organized by Georgia.
Meanwhile, Pyotr Pashkovski, official spokesman of Polish MFA, has reported that Poland has no reliable information that Russian militaries had opened fire in the territory of Georgia near the car column with President Lech Kaczynski. "It is necessary to establish all the facts relating to this incident," the "Interfax" quotes Mr Pashkovski as saying.
