Anti-terror committee says agents have arrested three suspects and found surface-to-air missiles, TNT and grenade launchers
Russia says it has foiled a plot by Islamist rebels to attack the southern city of Sochi when it hosts the Winter Olympics in 2014.
The country's anti-terror committee said agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) had arrested three suspected rebels and seized a large cache of weapons during a raid last week in Abkhazia, the Georgian breakaway region that borders Sochi.
"Russia's FSB could establish that militants were planning to move these weapons to Sochi during 2012-2014 to use for terror acts while planning and hosting the Olympic Games," the committee said in a statement.
They said the plot had been devised by the Chechen rebel Doku Umarov, the head of Caucasus Emirate, a rebel group that seeks to wrest the Caucasus region from Russia in order to set up an Islamist state. It has taken responsibility for devastating attacks on Russian territory, including the bombing of the Moscow metro in 2010 and the bombing of a Moscow airport last year.
The group has carried out no major attacks since then, although analysts have long feared it would seek to target the Olympic site in Sochi, which is just 300 miles from Chechnya. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has made Sochi's hosting of the Olympics one of his pet projects.
The committee said surface-to-air missiles, TNT and grenade launchers were among the weapons seized.
In a move likely to strain ties further, it accused Georgia, with which Russia has frozen relations since its August 2008 war over South Ossetia, another breakaway region, of aiding the plot.
"Doku Umarov, while maintaining close contacts with the Georgian special services, co-ordinated all activities to organise the delivery of materials to carry out acts of terror," the committee statement said. It also accused Georgia's security services and "associated representatives of illegal armed groups in Turkey" of smuggling 300 detonators from Georgia to Abkhazia in an operation that was discovered in February. Several Chechen exiles have been assassinated in Turkey in plots believed to involve the Russian security services.
Georgian officials denied the claim. "I can only say that the national anti-terrorist committee is staffed with people with peculiar fantasies," Shota Khizanishvili, chief of staff at Georgia's interior ministry, told the Associated Press. "They are always trying to accuse Georgia and its secret services of everything in any situation and without any grounds. This is a sign of a severe paranoia."
Russia maintains close ties to Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia after the fall of the Soviet Union and lies just 10 miles from Sochi. Russia recognised the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia following the 2008 war, which broke out one year after Sochi was awarded the Olympics following a personal push from Putin.
Security in the restive North Caucasus region has long been a concern. The Foreign Office advises against all travel to the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia and says the country includes a "high level of threat from terrorism".
Russia has tried to ease fears. The anti-terrorist committee said the weapons seizure was a "notable blow to the terrorist underground, leaving it no intention to disrupt the Olympic games in Sochi and destabilise the situation in the North Caucasus region".
The International Olympic Committee said: "Security at the Games is the responsibility of the local authorities and we have no doubt that the Russians will be up to the task."
