Search teams with sniffer dogs were closely tracking three U.N. observers abducted in a remote gorge while monitoring a truce between Georgia and separatist Abkhazia, a senior Georgian official said on Friday.
| Wonder who stole them away? |
The observers, two Germans and a Dane, were part of a 100-strong U.N. team monitoring the border with Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in 1993 in a bloody conflict following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unknown gunmen abducted them with their Georgian interpreter on Thursday while the team was on a routine patrol in the remote Kodori Gorge, site of several previous kidnappings of U.N. observers, who were all quickly released. The kidnappers had not yet contacted authorities or made any demands. "We are very close to finding their whereabouts," Emzar Kvitsiani, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze's envoy in the Kodori Gorge, told Reuters by telephone. "I can say that we are following their footsteps." The U.N. office in Tbilisi has identified the observers as Klaus Ott and Herbert Bauer of Germany and Henrik Soerensen of Denmark, and their Georgian interpreter as Lasha Chikashua. Kvitsiani said there was a 2,000 lari ($1,000) reward for information about their whereabouts, but there had been no contact so far with the kidnappers. "We still don't know their demands," he said.
| Probably money. That's bandido country... |
In the last such incident, two U.N. observers from Poland and Greece were held for a few days in December 2000. According to official accounts, they were released without conditions, like other U.N. observers abducted in the region. The United Nations began its mission in 1993 after separatists drove Georgian government troops out of Abkhazia in a war that killed about 10,000 people. Abkhazia is not recognised by any country or international body. 
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