On 11 August 2008, Stan Storimans had traveled to
Tbilisi with RTL
correspondent Jeroen Akkermans to report on the
Russian invasion of Georgia. Upon hearing that the city of
Gori had been abandoned ahead of the Russian military offensive, the duo arranged for a taxi driver to take them there the next day. The following morning they were joined by
Tsadok Yecheskeli, an Israeli reporter for
Yedioth Ahronoth. After witnessing bombings on the hills around the city, which the men took to be harmless due to the great distance at which these took place, they arrived in Gori at 10:00 on the morning of 12 August. and 11 Georgian civilians. More than 20 other people were injured, including Yecheskeli, who was severely wounded and evacuated to Israel for treatment after surgery in Tbilisi, and Akkermans and the taxi driver, who both sustained nonthreatening leg injuries. Other buildings in the immediate area had also been hit, but no structural damages were reported. Immediately after the explosion, two small craters were found on the square, as well as the remains of the then-unidentified projectile.
Investigations After an early assessment by
Reuters indicated that the blasts might have been the result of Russian
mortar fire, The Dutch member of parliament and Foreign Affairs spokesman
Harry van Bommel said that Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen summoned the Russian ambassador for clarification regarding reports of alleged use of cluster bombs by Russian forces in Georgia; he also urged the Dutch government to persuade the Russians to sign the
Convention on Cluster Munitions. The Director-General of
UNESCO,
Kōichirō Matsuura, also condemned the killings and recalled the obligation under
international law to respect the civilian status of reporters. He called on the authorities to investigate and take appropriate action. On 20 October 2008, the Dutch government announced its investigation has found that Storimans was in fact killed by a Russian cluster munition after the withdrawal of the Georgian army from the city. The investigative team sent to Georgia to gather
forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts concluded Storimans was killed by a munition "propelled by a type of
missile that is only found in Russia's military arsenal". Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen called the findings "very serious" and said in a statement he had "made that clear to the Russian authorities. Cluster munitions must not be used in this way. There were no troops present in Gori and innocent civilians were killed." Verhagen said the Netherlands plans to raise the matter with the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Legal proceedings On 19 April 2024, Storimans' widow, Marjolein Storimans-Verhulst, and his former colleague Jeroen Akkermans announced that they had filed a complaint for war crimes with the International Crimes Team of the Dutch
Public Prosecution Service against six (former) Russian servicemen. The accused are the driver of an
Iskander missile launcher vehicle and a number of officers and their commanders, who are charged with attacking the city of Gori at a time it could not be considered a
legitimate military target due to the lack of a Georgian military presence. The evidence for these charges was gathered and scrutinized through, among other things,
open-source intelligence (OSINT). In the statement, a comparison was made to the criminal case following the 2014 shoot-down of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in which a Dutch court found two Russians and a
Russian separatist in Ukraine guilty of shooting down the airliner and killing 298 civilians—193 of whom had been Dutch nationals. ==Stan Storimans Award==