The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced Thursday that it has requested the issuance of arrest warrants against three people for alleged war crimes committed during the war between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia in 2008.

They are Mayramovich Mindzaev (also spelled Mindzayev), then Minister of Internal Affairs of de facto independent South Ossetia, and Gamlet Guchmazov (or Kuchmazov) and David Georgiyevich Sanakoev, two other officials in South Ossetia, prosecutor Karim Khan said in a statement.

“These three people are criminally responsible”

“My request for these arrest warrants relates specifically to the unlawful detention, ill-treatment, hostage-taking and unlawful transfer of ethnic Georgian civilians in the context of an occupation by the Russian Federation,” said clarified the prosecutor.

“Based on the evidence collected and reviewed by my office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that these three individuals are criminally responsible” for war crimes committed in the territory of South Ossetia in August 2008,” he specified.

It is up to the judges of the ICC, which sits in The Hague, to approve or not the request for arrest warrants.

Hundreds of dead

The then Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, supported by the West, launched an offensive on the night of August 7 to 8, 2008 to retake South Ossetia, de facto independent since a conflict in the early 1990s that followed the dismantling of the former Soviet bloc.

Russia responded to the Georgian offensive by undertaking a major military operation and invading part of Georgia.

The conflict has killed several hundred people, according to an August 2008 report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The ICC opened an investigation in January 2016 into this war.

It was then his first investigation outside of Africa, and the first concerning a conflict involving Russia.

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