Five people, including a police officer, were killed and several wounded by a gunman who later killed himself in eastern Georgia, local officials said Friday.
The crime took place on Thursday evening in Sagarejo, a town of 10,000, about fifty kilometers east of Tbilisi.
This is reported by the Georgian Ministry of the Interior. the man fired an automatic weapon from an apartment balcony, killing four people in the building’s courtyard, as well as a police officer who had attended the scene.
Further, Five people were injured, one seriously.according to the same source.
“A special forces commando was on the scene and asked the gunman to surrender. Of course he fired again,” said Georgian Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri.
When special forces broke down the door of the apartment, the suspect committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, the minister added.
The shooter’s motives have yet to be clarified by authorities.
According to initial information, the man, born in 1974, served in the Georgian army between 2006 and 2021 and was deployed to Afghanistan, Gomelauri said.
These killings came as a shock to Georgia, where gun incidents are frequent but mass killings are rare.
In October, a man opened fire at a restaurant in Batumi, in the west of the country, killing one person.
The country, still recovering from a lightning war lost against Russia in 2008, has been rocked for several months by a political crisis related to the arrest of former President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Source: DN
