Attack on Abkhazia leader kills bodyguard

Gunmen on Wednesday attacked the vehicle of the leader of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia in an apparent assassination attempt which killed one of his bodyguards, news reports said. The local official news agency Apsnypress reported that the bodyguard died in hospital after the attack on Abkhaz leader Alexander Ankvab, who was being driven into work in the rebel region's main city Sukhumi. Ankvab told Russian agency Interfax that he was unharmed. "I was not hurt," he said. Abkhaz security sources told Interfax that an investigation was underway. "According to preliminary information, after a land mine placed in the way of the president of Abkhazia's motorcade exploded, the cars were fired on from a grenade launcher and a machine gun," an unnamed security source said. It was the sixth time that Ankvab has been targeted in an attack in recent years but none of the cases have so far been solved, Apsnypress reported. Russia recognised Abkhazia as independent in the wake of Moscow's brief war with Tbilisi in 2008. But with the exception of a handful of far-flung states, the rest of the world still regards it as part of Georgian territory. Abkhaz separatists waged a civil war with Georgia in the 1990s after the break-up of the Soviet Union that killed several thousand people and left 250,000, mostly ethnic Georgians, as refugees. Ankvab was elected leader of Abkhazia in August last year after the death of Sergei Bagapsh who led the breakaway region from 2005.