TBILISI, October 2. /TASS/. Three Serbian nationals who visited Georgia in late September held a training session for Georgian youth to instruct them on how to stage a coup planned for later this year, Georgia’s State Security Service said in a statement.
"These visitors declared their purpose in visiting Georgia to be conducting training for groups of people employed in the cultural field on how to conduct ‘strategic non-violent struggle,’ but an investigation revealed that this was not the sole objective of their trip to Georgia," the Georgian intel service said. "The true purpose of their visit was to establish communications and hold training sessions with those youth and prominent NGOs who would be the nucleus of destructive, illegal actions slated to take place in Georgia in October-December," the intel service added.
Sinisa Sikvan, Jelena Stosic and Sloboda Jinovic arrived in Georgia on September 25 at the invitation of the Georgian branch of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the statement reads. Between September 26 and 29, they held a series of training sessions at a hotel in the Georgian capital for non-governmental organizations and civil society activists, a group of trainees that "was supposed to have played a decisive role in organizing and carrying out an overthrow of the government through the use of force."
According to the Georgian State Security Service, the training sessions in Tbilisi were sponsored by the US government via USAID. The Georgian intel service also released excerpts from videos in which the three Serbs share their experience in holding protests and teach young Georgians specific gestures and actions.
The Serbian nationals, who represent the organization Canvas in the Balkan country, were interrogated at the State Security Service on Friday. During the interrogation, they tried to conceal the true purpose of their visit, and then departed for Bulgaria on September 30.
The State Security Service said in a statement on September 18 that former Georgian Deputy Interior Minister Giorgi Lortkiphanidze, who is currently located in Ukraine, and other individuals were planning to instigate a scenario later this year in Georgia modeled on the Euromaidan protests and riots that had rocked Ukraine in 2013-2014. The core of the Canvas organization is Otpor, an organization that played a pivotal role in the so-called "color revolution" in Serbia in 2000.