WHEN Venera Tebilova kissed her son Alan goodbye on a warm evening last October, she expected to see him home the next day. Barely 16, Alan set off with two friends to attend a religious festival in a nearby village in their native South Ossetia. More than three months later, Alan and his friends are still missing.

For weeks his frantic mother searched for him in vain. Finally, a farmer in a nearby village revealed that he had seen a group of armed men, dressed in camouflage, force the three friends at gunpoint into a car that drove them across the border into neighbouring Georgia.

“Other sources have since told me that Alan is being held in a prison in Georgia,” said Tebilova. “He was severely beaten. I have asked the Georgian authorities about him many times but they deny all knowledge of his fate. He’s just a boy. Why did they take him? I don’t know what to do to get my son back. I’m desperate.”

Alan’s case is not unique. Nearly five months since Georgia launched an attack on the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, and Russia retaliated by invading Georgia in a five-day war, tensions on both sides are still running high.

Since the end of the war, when Russia effectively annexed Russian-speaking parts of Georgia, the region has been plagued by a wave of kidnappings. In most cases the abductions have taken place along the disputed border.

Despite armed checkpoints on either side of the divide, the border is neither clearly marked nor fully recognised by the two enemies. In the past three months dozens of people have vanished.

Most are thought to have been abducted by Georgian or South Ossetian security forces, but the authorities on both sides generally deny all knowledge of the kidnappings. Captors either demand a hefty ransom or seek to exchange their victims for people held by the other side.

The practice has led to a shady trade involving complex negotiations and unscrupulous middlemen.

According to Inga Yelbakiyeva, a South Ossetian whose husband, Pavel, is missing, a group of armed Georgians abducted two men from a village on the border in early October. The two were released after Pavel and Oleg Gigolayev, a friend, retaliated by abducting several Georgians and demanding that their two fellow villagers were released.

The two sides quickly exchanged their captives without a ransom being paid.

Two days later Gigolayev was gunned down by a sniper.

“Pavel was abducted a week later,” said Yelbakiyeva. “He is being held by the Georgians. I’m told he’s alive but he was badly beaten. We are trying to negotiate his release but it’s a very complex process.”

A source said Pavel might eventually be exchanged for the bodies of several Georgians killed in the conflict last August.

In a similar case in South Ossetia, Ahsartag Bekoyev, 57, has been missing since mid-October. After searching for him for several weeks, his wife, Marusya Kozayeva, said she was approached by a middleman who told her that her husband was being held in Georgia and would be released for a ransom of £8,000, a prohibitive sum for the impoverished family.

“My husband is very ill,” said Kozayeva. “I have four grandchildren to look after. We don’t even have enough winter clothes for all the kids. For us, it’s simply impossible to find such a huge sum.”

Violence is increasing on both sides. Despite the ceasefire, South Ossetian militias, which were accused of ethnic cleansing during the war, are still operating with impunity.

A few weeks ago a group of drunken irregular soldiers beat to death an elderly ethnic Georgian living in South Ossetia when he refused to hand over one of his sheep. In another incident, an 83-year-old man was savagely beaten by militias as punishment for having a portrait of Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, in his house.

Saakashvili, who Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said should be “hung by the balls”, is coming under pressure at home where the opposition has accused him of being responsible for the war. He claims that he ordered the attack on South Ossetia in self-defence.

His account of the events that led to conflict has been disputed in part by independent observers. Moscow argues that it was attacked first.

The wrangling is of little comfort to those living in the border regions. “I was collecting firewood when I was abducted by a group of armed South Ossetian men,” said an ethnic Georgian who went missing in November but managed to escape.

“I was blindfolded and held with five other Georgians in a cellar. Our captors threatened us and said we would be released only if a couple of South Ossetians held by Georgia were sent home.

“They say the war is over. Well, for us, it’s still very much going on. People vanish all the time and we’re all living in fear.”

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