A U.S. passport was found in a building in South Ossetia occupied by Georgian troops, a Russian military spokesperson revealed on Thursday. After Russian peacekeepers cleared the heavily defended building, a passport belonging to a Texan named Michael Lee
Deputy Chief of Russia's General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn showed photocopies of the passport to media in a news briefing on Thursday. “There is a building in Zemonekozi – a settlement to the south of Tskhinval that was fiercely defended by a Georgian special operations squad. Upon clearing the building, Russian peacekeepers recovered, among other documents, an American passport in the name of Michael Lee White of Texas,” said Nogovitsyn. Neither the owner of the passport nor his remains were found at the scene, despite a thorough search. “I do not know why he was there, but it is a fact that he was in the building, among Georgian special forces troops,” Nogovitsyn said. The briefing was delivered on the same day Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told CNN, “We have serious reasons to believe that American citizens were right at the heart of the military action”. Putin said the conflict in South Ossetian may have been planned to benefit one of the U.S. presidential candidates.