TBILISI. Nov 8 (Interfax) - The Georgian Interior Ministry on Friday released video tapes of the interrogations of two out of 13 detained suspected Russian spies.
Tbilisi claims that one of them, Pyotr Devrishadze, is a Russian citizen. The Georgian media reported on Friday that he permanently lives in Georgia but has business in Russia.
In his video confession Devrishadze said that in 2006 an official from the Russian consulate by the name of Goncharov approached him and advised him to fly to Moscow to meet a certain Viktor Vasilyevich.
"In Moscow I met Viktor Vasilyevich in some building where I was introduced to a certain Oleg Alexandrovich who told me about my business in Moscow and about my wish to get my son to a college in St. Petersburg. He said that my business would come to an end, if I refused to cooperate with them. I signed an agreement on cooperation that they dictated to me," Devrishadze said.
He said that he was checked on a lie detector for five hours.
"I was told to set up a group of 50 people who would be deployed in different places by five," he said.
The video was interrupted at this point.
Another detainee, Georgian military pilot Merab Ustalishivli said in front of the camera that he had been recruited in 2003 by the military advisor of the then leader of Ajaria Aslan Abashidze Yury Netkachev.
"Later, in 2004 I was told that I would have to report on what was happening at my army unit, specifically the number of helicopters and their flight capacity, whether they were being repaired or not, how long their remaining service life was and also aboutl the combat objectives of our unit and the location of firing ranges," Ustalishvili said.
The documentary about the suspected Russian spies and their interrogations will be aired on Friday evening by Rustavi 2 broadcasting company. In the past few days the TV channel has been promoting the documentary.
The Russian Foreign Ministry declared on Friday that the new spy story in Tbilisi is a provocation of the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and it is timed specially several important international events.
"The Saakashvili regime suffers from chronic anti-Russian spy mania. During the past few years the Georgian leadership has resorted to the fabrication of such scandals many times cynically hoping to gain home and foreign policy dividends," the ministry commentary says.
"It is also obvious that the Georgian side is preparing to come to the OSCE summit in Astana on December 1-2 with a new portion of anti-Russian rhetoric wishing to impose its own idea of the situation in the Caucasus on the participants in the summit," the statement says.
"It is an open secret that lately such Georgian moves meet with increasingly skeptical response from the international community, especially after the report of the EU commission led by Heidi Tagliavini definitely confirmed the fact that it was Saakashvili who launched the armed conflict in the Caucasus in August 2008," the statement says.
"The other apparent purpose is to use the bogie of a Russian threat to keep up the anti-Russian hysteria in Georgia," the ministry says.
"However, this apparent provocation will hardly produce the effect on which its organizers counted because the price of these propaganda tricks of Tbilisi is well known to everything," the Foreign Ministry commentary says.