TBILISI - The armed forces of Georgia's separatist Abkhazia region said on Sunday they had shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane, prompting denials from the Georgian side.
"The latest spy plane belonging to Georgian armed forces was shot down by our armed forces" over Abkhazia's Gali district on Sunday, the deputy head of Abkhazia's armed forces, Anatoly Zaitsev, said on Russian national television.
A search is under way for remnants of the drone, another member of the Abkhaz leadership, Ruslan Kishmariya, told Russia's Interfax news agency.
Tensions have risen around Georgia's separatist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since Wednesday, when Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree promising them heightened support.
The Abkhaz leadership last claimed to have shot down a Georgian drone on March 18 but Georgia denied this.
After Sunday's claim, Georgia's minister for integration of the separatist regions, Temur Yakobashvili, said an unmanned plane had exploded over Gali but denied it belonged to Georgia.
"The Georgian air force doesnt possess such planes. Nor does the Abkhaz military," he told AFP.
And a Georgian defence ministry spokeswoman denied that the armed forces had conducted flights over Abkhazia.
"Our planes have performed no flights over the territories controlled by the Abkhaz side," the spokeswoman, Nana Intskirveli, told AFP.
Putin's decree on support for the separatists has been condemned by Georgia's pro-Western leadership as an attempt at annexing Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Abkhazia, a sliver of land on the Black Sea coast, broke away in a conflict in the early 1990s and exists as a de facto independent state with strong economic and diplomatic support from Russia.
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04/20/2008 11:20 GMT