Nine people, including five UN observers, are feared dead after their helicopter was shot down in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia this morning.
"We all saw it [the helicopter] explode. Of course they are all dead," the official at the Abkhaz defence ministry told Reuters.
The nationalities of the dead were not immediately known. Officials from the UN observer mission to Georgia were holding an emergency meeting.
UN observers are deployed on the separation line between Georgia and Abkhazia, which declared independence from Tbilisi in 1991 and drove out Georgian government forces in 1993.