British film deployed in Russia's war

A video documentary in which a British journalist was killed while filming last week, provides proof that Chechen rebels are using Georgian territory to launch attacks on Russia, according to Russian officials.

Footage taken by Roderick Scott, a freelance TV journalist working for Frontline TV, shows the group of Chechen fighters crossing from what appears to be Georgian territory into Ingushetia, a Russian republic neighbouring Chechnya.

Russia has long claimed that Tbilisi is complicit in rebel use of the Pankisi gorge - on the Georgia-Russia border - as a base, and has threatened to invade Georgia in self-defence.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, wrote to the UN last month, warning that Moscow might launch pre-emptive strikes against Georgia.

The group of Chechen rebels with whom Mr Scott was travelling broke into Ingushetia last week, causing the first clashes in the republic to date, and the worst fighting in the region for two years. Seventeen Russian soldiers and dozens of rebels died.

The tape provides crucial evidence which may expedite military confrontation between the two former Soviet Union members, who have played out a war of attrition for the past few months.

Last week, the Russian defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, said that irrefutable evidence about Chechen rebels crossing from Georgia into Russia could spark massive military retaliation.

A senior Russian politician, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the international committee of the parliament, said last night: "These tapes are evidence that Chechen fighters can move freely through Georgian territory."

The footage, shown on the Russian state TV channel RTR after it was handed over by Russian officials, begins with Mr Scott in a small room.

He scans the camera around and is heard explaining that he has spent a few weeks in Georgia, and is now about to cross into Russian territory with a group of Chechen rebels.

The footage then switches to a group of rebels eating at a camp in the forests.

Scott films them setting up and dismantling camp. They load up horses with supplies and long tubular instruments - possibly surface-to-air missiles - wrapped in polythene.

The television station then switched the footage to the march across the Caucasus mountains.

The Chechen fighters, renowned for their endurance, can be heard panting and gasping for air amid the mountain mist.

The filming resumes in Ingushetia with shots of Ingushetian civilians scurrying along the edge of a forest, as a Russian helicopter approaches.

A few seconds of a firefight are shown, and a Russian helicopter launches a missile. Scott was reportedly killed by a bullet that hit the eyepiece of his camera.

Mr Scott's body has yet to be identified from among the dozens of rebel corpses at Galashki.

His passport has been found. It contains a Georgian visa with his entry into Tbilisi recorded, but no exit stamp.