Man blows himself up in Georgia’s breakaway region

MOSCOW – A man has blown himself up at a television station in the capital of Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia, Russian news agencies said on Monday.

Interfax on quoted local Interior Ministry officials saying the man, who has not been identified, set off the bomb at the entrance to the Abkhazian State Television in Sukhumi on Monday morning. Authorities said the man might have had an accomplice.

Authorities stopped short of calling the incident a terrorist attack, with the self-proclaimed president Raul Khadzhimba telling Interfax the investigation is ongoing.

Despite tension with Georgia, Abkhazia has no history of terrorist attacks on its turf.

Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia effectively gained complete control over it and a second breakaway Georgian region, South Ossetia, after a brief war against Georgia in 2008. The Abkhazian border is just a few kilometres (miles) away from Sochi, a Black Sea resort that hosted the 2014 Winter Games.

Russia news agencies quoted Abkhazia’s interior ministry as saying that the improvised explosive device contained an equivalent of 200 grams of TNT.