Georgians find inactive grenade near Bush stage
Georgia’s security chief said today an inactive grenade had been found near the site where President George Bush made a speech in Tbilisi on Tuesday.
Gela Bezhuashvili, secretary of the National Security Council, said the Soviet-made, RPG-5 grenade was found 100 feet from the stand where Bush spoke.
US Secret Service spokesman Jonathan Cherry had said on Tuesday that his agency had been informed that a device, possibly a hand grenade, had been thrown near the stage during Bush’s speech, hit someone in the crowd and fallen to the ground.
Bezhuashvili said, however, that it was not thrown, it was “found.”
“The goal is clear – to frighten or to scare people and to attract the attention of the mass media,” he said. “The goal has been reached and that is why I’m talking to you now.”
“In any case there was no danger whatsoever for the presidents,” he said.
Investigators are examining the grenade, which Bezhuashvili said was a “so-called engineering grenade,” found in “inactive mode.”
“I am not an expert but it was not possible to detonate it there,” he said.
“Nevertheless, this is the subject of our close attention and it is being studied jointly by the Georgian and American sides. Afterward, conclusions will be drawn.”
Security was very tight at Bush’s speech in Freedom Square: Georgian police were deployed, and US snipers were visible on the rooftops, scanning the crowd with binoculars.
US agents, together with their Georgian counterparts, manned the security gates, making even Georgian performers – who in some cases were decked out with fake ammunition as part of their costumes – remove every piece of metal before passing through the detectors.
Many in the crowd were carrying plastic soda bottles, which they used to squirt water on each other to stave off the heat after hours of standing without shelter under the bright sun. There were many young people horsing around during the speeches – especially when the translation was muffled and the speech unintelligible – and some threw plastic bottles at one another for entertainment.
