On June 14, the Georgian Prosecutor General's Office in the case of Archil Tatunashvili accused two law enforcement officers of the Republic of South Ossetia and demanded that citizens of the RSO appear in the police department of the neighboring state. The South Ossetian Foreign Ministry commented on the accusations of the Georgian side, noting that the Georgian media regularly replicate biased publications in which representatives of law enforcement agencies, violating the presumption of innocence of citizens under the jurisdiction of another state, say about the alleged involvement of A.V. Tabuev and D.D. Gurtsiyev to "illegal detention, torture and murder of the resident of Georgia.
"As the South Ossetian side has repeatedly reported, the death of a citizen of Georgia, Archil Tatunashvili, came as a result of acute heart failure due to coronary heart disease, which was confirmed both by preliminary examination and by independent Russian experts. The case was closed by the competent authorities of the Republic of South Ossetia, "the statement said.
The department has stressed that without a doubt, the Georgian side, trying to gain political dividends, blindly uses the tragic incident that took place to aggravate the situation to the detriment of common sense, the norms of civilized interstate dialogue and the principles of international law.
"At the same time, the Georgian authorities are trying to divert the attention of their people from pressing internal problems, artificially creating idle external tricks," the Foreign Ministry noted. - The Republic of South Ossetia is a sovereign and recognized state operating within its legal framework, to the territory of which the jurisdiction of neighboring Georgia does not extend. "
The department believes that it would be naive to believe that representatives of the law enforcement agencies of the Republic of South Ossetia, performing their official duties in strict accordance with the laws in force in the territory of South Ossetia, will rush into the arms of the Georgian police at the first call.
"The international community should pay attention to the fact that the Georgian side shamelessly uses this very sensitive topic related to the death of Tatunashvili, against the backdrop of the Geneva discussions taking place these days," the ministry noted. "The Georgian side also makes attempts to use the death of a Georgian citizen in Tskhinval, making sweeping accusations against the Republic, but the South Ossetian delegation once again presented a reasoned position regarding the groundlessness of these accusations."
The ministry has added that in this connection "we regard the actions of the Georgian side as a rude interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and consider it inadmissible to consciously manipulate and cynically use the tragedy of the Tatunashvili family to buildup tension around South Ossetia."
