(Inserts NATO head's full title and name in 17th paragraph) By Matt Robinson and Margarita Antidze TBILISI, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Georgia produced telephone intercepts on Tuesday it said proved Russian armour entered Georgia hours before the start of a Georgian attack that Moscow said forced it to send in its troops. The release of the intercepts comes as both Moscow and Tbilisi wage a diplomatic and public relations campaign to prove the other side fired the first shot in a war that killed hundreds of people and caused widespread devastation. Russia said the evidence was "not serious". The force movements referred to in the intercepts may, it said, have been a routine rotation by Russian peacekeeping forces already operating in Georgia before the war broke out early last month. The intercepts, a transcript of which was provided to Reuters by the Georgian Interior Ministry, purport to be of telephone conversations between security officials in South Ossetia, the separatist region at the centre of the war. Reuters has not been able to independently verify the intercepts are authentic. NATO said it would support an independent inquiry to establish the facts. One transcript quotes a border guard near South Ossetia's border with Russia stating early on Aug. 7 that Russian armour was crossing into South Ossetia. "The intercepted calls confirm that the first units of the Russian regular army with heavy armor had entered and passed through the Roki tunnel during the early morning of Aug. 7, more than 12 hours before Georgian forces started to mobilise," the ministry said in a 'background memo' to the transcripts. "NOT SERIOUS" Russia says it was forced to launch an air, land and sea assault against Georgia to halt a "genocide" by Georgia against South Ossetians, many of whom hold Russian passports. But pro-Western Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Moscow had started the war by invading his country, and that phone intercepts and witnesses proved it. "The conflict with Russia was not a conflict we chose, nor was it a conflict we initiated," he told a news conference. "This was an illegal and premediated invasion, and when we acted, we acted in self-defence." Western states have condemned Russian actions, though some have also expressed doubts about Georgia's own role in the build-up to the conflict -- concerns that may hinder Tbilisi's ambition of being invited to join NATO. Asked about the transcripts, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told a news briefing in Moscow: "This planting sometimes of news about 'What we heard or what we overheard', that is not serious." He said satellite images acquired by NATO states would prove clearly that Georgia was the aggressor, opening fire on the breakaway capital Tskhinvali with heavy artillery. He said those images should be made available to the rest of the world. ARMOUR ARRIVING One intercept Georgia said was made at 03:52 on Aug. 7 purported to have the voice of an official at the South Ossetian border guard office in Tskhinvali and the duty officer at the Roki tunnel, the land entrance to South Ossetia from Russia. The Georgian Interior Ministry provided its own translation of the recordings into English: - Border guard HQ: "Has the armor already entered?" - Duty officer: "Armor and people." - Border guard HQ: "Did they enter now?" - Duty officer: "Yes, when I called you for the first time they had already come out of the tunnel, around 20 minutes ago." Georgian Interior Ministry official Shota Utiashvili told Reuters Tbilisi had "plenty of other evidence" it had shared with Western intelligence agencies. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, speaking with Saakashvili at the close of a two-day visit to Georgia by alliance envoys, said he supported the idea of an independent inquiry. "Let me not now go into what happened when, where and what hour," he said. "But I think it might be useful that an independent inquiry can establish facts." A senior U.S. diplomat said the information in the transcripts was in line with what Georgian officials told him at the time. Washington is Georgia's closest big-power ally and has been highly critical of Russia over the war. "Literally in the heat of the battle, it seemed genuinely true to me ... that senior Georgian leaders truly believed that Russian forces had already moved through the Roki tunnel late in the night on Aug 7," U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza told Reuters in Tbilisi. (Additional reporting by Conor Sweeney in Moscow; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
A video grab shows firefighters working near the wreckage of a Russian airliner near the Siberian city of Perm, September 14, 2008. The Boeing 737-500 airliner crashed near the Ural mountains ...
