WASHINGTON, May 18: US President George Bush was informed on Tuesday that the grenade tossed at him during a May 10 speech in Georgia was armed and could have caused serious harm, his spokesman said. “We’ve learned about the statement that the FBI and the Georgian authorities made last night. The president was updated on it last night and received additional updates at this morning’s briefing. We want to know about the results of the investigation and know more about what the facts are,” said spokesman Scott McClellan.

The grenade was found near the podium where Mr Bush and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili stood as they spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands of people in a Tbilisi square.

News of the grenade incident came first from the US Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting presidents. A spokesman said Georgian authorities had informed the secret service that a grenade had been thrown at the podium where Mr Bush was standing.

Georgian authorities, however, said hours later that the grenade had not been thrown at all but was merely ‘found’ on the ground near the podium, that it had been unarmed and that it was only an ‘engineering’ device and not a military grenade designed to scatter shrapnel widely.

“The act of tossing a hand grenade towards the podium where the US and Georgian presidents were presenting speeches on Liberty Square on May 10 represented a real threat against the health and welfare of both presidents,” Bryan Paarmann, a US embassy legal attache who also represents the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), told reporters.

“According to a qualified inspection, this hand grenade appears to be a live device that simply failed to function” for technical reasons, he said during a briefing at Georgia’s interior ministry.

US investigators from the FBI, the secret service and the diplomatic security service were continuing to investigate the incident along with Georgian law enforcement personnel, Mr Paarmann said. The White House had initially insisted upon Mr Bush’s return that his life had never been in danger. —AFP