By Helena Bedwell

The Georgian government will pay to return the body of a man beaten to death by Moscow police two days ago, the refugees and accommodation minister said.

“We expect his body to be brought to Georgia as early as tomorrow and we will cover the transportation and funeral expenses,” Koba Subeliani told reporters in the capital Tbilisi today. “It’s an enormous tragedy for his family, who have lived in Georgia as refugees since fleeing Abkhazia.”

Russian prosecutors yesterday said a policeman had been detained on suspicion of beating two men from the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia, killing one of them. The policeman was drunk and in uniform at the time of the attack, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office said on its Web site.

Russia routed Georgia’s U.S.-trained army in an August 2008 war over another breakaway region, South Ossetia, and later recognized both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as sovereign countries and pledged to defend their borders.

Subeliani said the deceased man and his family had fled Abkhazia during a war in the early 1990s that resulted in the region’s de facto independence from Georgia. The man’s family lives near Tbilisi, Subeliani said.

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