Moscow warns Georgia to release Russian officers

TBILISI, Sep 28 (Reuters) Russia warned Georgia today that it would use every means to free a group of Russian army officers held for alleged spying in an affair that has plunged bitter relations to a new low.

As Russia's foreign and defence ministers seethed with anger, dozens of Georgian police maintained a presence outside the regional headquarters of Russian forces in an eastern district of Tbilisi.

The affair dramatised the deteriorating ties between the small ex-Soviet state and its former colonial master, Russia, which is alarmed by the pro-Western policies of President Mikhail Saakashvili that include joining NATO.

Georgian authorities said yesterday they had detained four GRU (Russian army intelligence) officers and pulled in more than 10 Georgian citizens. Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said they had been involved in a serious plot.

Georgia's interior ministry meanwhile confirmed a report by Rustavi-2 television that two other Russians had been detained on similar charges.

The Russian embassy in Tbilisi said five Russian officers in all were being held. It had visited the five and they were being well treated but, it added, Georgian authorities had produced no evidence of espionage against them.

Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov denounced as a ''complete outrage'' Georgia's action which he said had also included the beating of a Russian officer and six soldiers in a separate incident in the Black Sea port of Batumi.

ANGER Shaking with anger on Russian state-controlled ORT television, Ivanov said: ''These acts are an open attempt to provoke, with a hysteria that is customary for the Georgian leadership, the Russian Federation to inappropriate action.'' ''We have demanded the immediate release of our citizens and we will achieve this with all the means available to us,''Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

''This cannot be seen in any other way but as the latest example of an anti-Russian policy,'' Lavrov said, in televised comments from Sakhalin in Russia's far east.

Officials in the small mountainous state in the Caucasus have been talking for weeks about a coup plot mounted by Russia against Saakashvili.

Earlier this month Georgian authorities arrested about 20 opposition activists on charges of plotting a foreign-funded coup. They were all linked to a party whose fugitive leader has support in the Moscow establishment.

Only last Friday, Saakashvili accused Moscow from the rostrum of the United Nations of trying to annex parts of his country which are controlled by separatists forces.

The Russian army still has two bases in Georgia -- relics of Soviet times -- which are to be withdrawn by bilateral agreement in 2008.

Russian embassy spokesman Mikhail Svirin said the delivery of visas to Georgians had been suspended forthwith.

REUTERS SP RN1555