TSKHINVALI. Dec 23 (Interfax-AVN) - A woman from South Ossetia has been detained in Tbilisi, South Ossetian officials said.
"The office of the special representative of South Ossetia's president was alerted to the detention of a female citizen of South Ossetia by Georgia's law enforcement services," a spokesman for the special representative's office, Guram Sobayev, told Interfax on Wednesday.
An investigator from South Ossetia's Leningorsk prosecutor's office told the special representative's office over the phone on December 22 that a woman living in the Leningorsk district, Khatuna Charayeva, had been detained in Tbilisi, Sobayev said.
"The woman, her son-in-law and son were en route to a Tbilisi market where they planned to sell agricultural products grown by them when Georgian policemen approached Charayeva and allegedly found fake banknotes worth $30,000 in her bag. The woman was then detained, but her son-in-law and son were freed," he said.
"The Charayev family has always been extremely poor, and the accusations of keeping fake foreign currency banknotes brought against Charayeva have evidently been fabricated," Sobayev said, referring to the investigator.
The South Ossetian president's human rights commissioner David Tsanakoyev told Interfax that he planned to contact European Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg to inform him of the latest detention of a South Ossetian citizen by Georgian security services.