Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia prior to the Georgian Civil War of 1991–1993. Eleven combatants on both sides, including Georgian OMON members and regular militsiya officers, were reported killed in skirmishes during September and October 1991. There were also allegations of OMON firing at unarmed protesters. Post-Soviet OMON activities Prior to the creation of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the bulk of the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, on the Azeri side, was conducted by the post-Soviet OMON units and irregular forces. This included the defence of the village of Khojaly by a group of Azeri OMON troops and armed volunteers against the Armenian and Russian Army forces prior to, and during, the Khojaly massacre on 25 February 1992; most of the group involved died along with several hundred other Azeris, mostly civilians. South Ossetian ad hoc OMON, organized by a group of Tskhinvali internal affairs division militsiya officers, was reportedly the most combat-ready force on the separatist side at the outset of the South Ossetia War in April 1992. In Tajikistan, the civil war began after local OMON began defecting to anti-Nabiyev protesters in May 1992. The country's minority Pamiri people largely backed the United Tajik Opposition, and for that reason were targeted for massacres by pro-government forces during the bloody first phase of the war in 1992–1993. A significant portion of the Tajikistan MVD's command structure and its OMON consisted mainly of Pamiris who were then either killed or forced to flee to Gorno-Badakhshan. North Ossetia's OMON participated in the short but vicious 1992 East Prigorodny Conflict in Russia. They killed or 'disappeared' hundreds of local indigenous Ingush people. Ossetian OMON reportedly massacred residents of Ingush villages that had first been shelled by Russian federal army tanks that were officially in to the region for 'peacekeeping' purposes. Following the War of Transnistria in 1992, several high-ranking former OMON and KGB officers assumed senior posts in Moldova's pro-Russian separatist region of Transnistria. Former Riga OMON Major Vladimir Antyufeyev, who had led the attacks against Latvian authorities in 1991 and was put on the Interpol wanted list, renamed himself "General Vadim Shevtsov" and became Transnistria's minister of state security and intelligence. He is also alleged to have overseen the self-declared republic's organized criminal smuggling rackets. In 2012, the KGB of Transnistria announced it has "launched a criminal investigation into Vladimir Antyufeev who is suspected of misuse of state powers." Moscow