Abkhazian president-elect Alexander Ankvab to be sworn in

Abkhazian president-elect Alexander Ankvab will be sworn in on Monday in a ceremony broadcast by the country's television. Abkhazian parliament speaker Nugzar Ashuba said no foreign guests had been invited. Ankvab, 58, the winner of Abkhazia's presidential election, earlier said he wants to be sworn in with little pomp, following the death of former president Sergei Bagapsh. Ankvab, who was Abkhazia's interior minister in 1992-1993, garnered nearly 55 percent of the vote in the August 26, 2011 election in the tiny mountainous region on the Black Sea coast which declared independence from Georgia in 1999. Tbilisi continues to regard it as a breakaway region. Bagapsh died, aged 62, in a Moscow hospital on May 29 after undergoing lung surgery. Bagapsh became de facto president in 2004 and won recognition of Abkhazia's independence from Moscow following its short-lived war with Georgia in 2008 over another disputed region, South Ossetia.