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NATO chief offers to eat tie over plane claim

BRUSSELS, Belgium — NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has told Moscow he will eat his necktie if Russia can prove that a jet fighter from the Western alliance shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane, his spokesman said Wednesday.

The secretary general had said he’d eat his tie if it turned out that a NATO MiG-29 had magically appeared in Abkhazia and shot down a Georgian drone, NATO spokesman James Appathurai told reporters.

“There is no danger of the secretary general getting indigestion,” he added.

Georgia says a Russian MiG-29 shot down its spy plane over the Moscow-backed breakaway region of Abkhazia last week. The incident has exacerbated tense relations between Russia and Georgia, its small southern neighbor, with each side accusing the other of preparing for war. Russia denies one of its planes downed the drone.

Appathurai said Russian ambassador Dmitry Rogozin had implied during a private meeting with de Hoop Scheffer this week that the plane had been shot down by a MiG-29 from one of the NATO nations from eastern Europe.

NATO members Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary operate MiG-29s.