Screen grab from the Interior Ministry’s footage showing a forensic expert examining an explosive put into a sour cream pack outside the prosecutor’s office in the town of Zugdidi on May 4.

The Georgian Interior Ministry identified a man, suspected of placing an explosive device outside the local prosecutor’s office in the town of Zugdidi as Roland Khurtsilava.

Khurtsilava, who was reportedly arrested immediately after he left a black plastic bag with an explosive device at the fence of the prosecutor’s office in Zugdidi, is "a resident of Gali district" of breakaway Abkhazia, an Interior Ministry official told Civil.ge on May 5. 

In a video testimony released by the Interior Ministry, Khurtsilava says speaking in Russian, that “an old acquaintance of mine, a military serviceman, lieutenant colonel Vasily Vasilevich” approached him and offered 80,000 Russian rubles (about USD 2,600) for placing an explosive device at the prosecutor’s office in Zugdidi. Khurtsilava said that initially he declined, but agreed later when he was again offered the same proposal by the same Russian serviceman.

“He gave me a bomb; I brought it to Zugdidi at the prosecutor’s office, where I was arrested,” Khurtsilava says.

Meanwhile on May 5, Tbilisi Central shopping mall was evacuated because of an abandoned bag that caused a bomb alarm, which turned out to be false.