by Maya Topuria
TBILISI, Aug 19 (AFP) - Eleven people were reported killed Thursday in fighting in the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia, as Georgia and Russia continued to joust over who was to blame for the conflict.
Speaking on television, Georgian Interior Minister Irakli Okruashvili said there had been heavy fighting in the region overnight and said Georgian troops had killed and recovered the bodies of eight Cossacks fighting with South Ossetian rebels.
The corpses however were not seen by independent observers and a spokeswoman for the breakaway South Ossetian administration denied the Georgian claim.
"The Georgian interior minister's statement that eight Cossacks were killed near Tskhinvali last night is not true," Interfax news agency quoted spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva as saying.
Gagloyeva initially denied any South Ossetians had died but later told Russia's Moscow Echo radio that four Ossetians had been killed.
The dead included a 15-year-old boy shot by a sniper and a family of three who died in a mortar blast, Gagloyeva said, adding that two other people had been wounded.
Separately, Interfax quoted an unnamed Georgian defense ministry official as saying three Georgian servicemen had been killed and seven wounded in the fighting.
The conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia has steadily escalated since the start of August.
"The defense and interior ministries have lost 24 people and have had another 50 injured," Georgian interior ministry spokesman Guram Donadze said of the toll since the start of the month.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said Georgian forces had captured strategic locations in South Ossetia and were poised to retake control by force of the entire rebel province, on the republic's border with Russia.
"We took control of various strategic heights," Saakashvili told reporters.
"We are prepared to return these heights, which really have strategic significance and that allow us to quickly take control of the whole territory."
But handing back the captured territory and withdrawing all but 500 Georgian soldiers from South Ossetia would only happen as part of a solid peace agreement, he said.
The speaker of Georgia's parliament meanwhile lashed out at Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he had "misinterpreted" the crisis in South Ossetia and renewed accusations of bias against Russian peacekeeping forces in the pro-Moscow region.
"I wouldn't even like to respond to Putin in the tone that he used," Nino Burjanadze told reporters in Tbilisi.
She was responding to Putin's assertion Wednesday that the South Ossetian crisis was rooted in a "stupid decision" by Tbilisi to revoke the region's Soviet-era autonomous status after it became independent in 1991.
Since he came to power in November 2003, Saakashvili has been trying to reassert Tbilisi's control over the whole of his country, including pro-Russian regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia that have enjoyed de facto independence since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Repeated fighting has undermined a ceasefire signed late last week between Georgia, Russia, South Ossetia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Georgian Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili called Wednesday, during a speech to the OSCE in Vienna, for an international conference to end the escalation of violence in South Ossetia.