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TBILISI, Georgia : Outraged Georgians on Sunday slammed a local television channel that sparked panic by broadcasting a faked report announcing that Russia had launched an invasion and the country's president was dead.
The Georgian opposition condemned the newscast as a state-sponsored stunt aimed at smearing President Mikheil Saakashvili's critics, while the president himself added to the furore by appearing to defend the broadcast.
The report, aired on Saturday night on privately-owned Imedi television, said Russian tanks were headed for the capital Tbilisi, Saakashvili had been killed and that some opposition leaders had sided with invading forces.
"It was indeed a very unpleasant programme, but the most unpleasant thing is that it is extremely close to what can happen and to what Georgia's enemy has conceived," Saakashvili said in televised remarks.
Local news agencies said the programme provoked widespread alarm, a record number of calls to emergency services and multiple incidents of heart attacks and fainting, though officials on Sunday said no deaths had been reported.
The report showed footage taken from the August 2008 war that saw Russian troops pour into Georgia and bomb targets across the country.
A brief notice before the report said it was a "simulation" of possible events, but the report itself appeared genuine and carried no warning it was a fake.
Opposition leader Nino Burjanadze - who was among those the report claimed had joined forces with Russia - said the newscast was government-sponsored propaganda.
"This government's treatment of its own people is outrageous. I am sure that every second of this programme was agreed with Saakashvili. Many people suffered psychological trauma," Burjanadze, a former speaker of parliament who heads the Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, told AFP.
"Every word about me was malicious slander and I will sue both Imedi television and the authorities," she said.
Georgia's opposition has accused the government of using national television networks including Imedi, which is run by a close Saakashvili ally, to smear government critics.
Government officials denied any advance knowledge of the report and denounced it as irresponsible.
"The opposition is creating a myth that this programme was agreed with the authorities and trying to use that myth to its own ends," the head of Georgia's National Security Council, Eka Tkeshelashvili, told AFP.
"Of course this is completely untrue. This programme was an extremely unpleasant surprise to the authorities," she said.
Saakashvili said the report was not aimed at insulting Burjanadze's "dignity", but he nonetheless lashed out at her recent meetings with senior officials in Moscow, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Imedi apologised for airing the fake programme, but not before outraged Georgian citizens launched campaigns condemning the channel.
Two Facebook pages denouncing Imedi emerged shortly after the broadcast and together had attracted more than 6,000 fans by mid-day Sunday.
Officials in Russia were also quick to denounce the report as a government-organised provocation.
"Through lies and shocking provocations Saakashvili is continuing to set the brotherly Georgian and Russian peoples upon each other. This is a sick and dangerous man and his actions are criminal," Russia's ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin told the Interfax news agency.
Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 in response to a Georgian military attempt to retake the Moscow-backed rebel region of South Ossetia.
After occupying swathes of territory, Russian forces later mostly withdrew into South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, which Moscow has recognised as independent states. - AFP/ms
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