Tskhinvali KGB Says Detained Georgian Man was to Collect Bats for Bio-warfare, Tbilisi Denies

KGB of the Russian-occupied Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia announced on July 16 that a Georgian man – detained on July 3 for violating “state border” – attempted to infiltrate into the region “to collect the colonies of bats” from Tskhinvali district.

Continuing renewed bio-warfare allegations, the KGB of the Kremlin-backed region alleged that “South Ossetian sharp-eared moths” were under the interest of Tbilisi-based Lugar Center for Public Health Research.

Amiran Gamkrelidze, the Head of the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health of Georgia, which runs the Lugar Research Center, slammed the information released by Tskhinvali KGB as “lies” and “staged provocation.”

Gamkrelidze told Civil.ge that a group of the Center’s experts has indeed been studying bats, that helped to reveal that flying mammals in Georgia are not carriers of various types of coronaviruses and rabies. He said that the Center’s special groups comprised of zoo-entomologists, not ordinary citizens as alleged by Tskhinvali, are involved in sample collection works.

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