KASPI, Georgia — Georgia accused Russian troops of blowing up a key railway bridge yesterday after the United States had called on Moscow to pull its forces out of the country immediately.

In the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a ceasefire pact ending hostilities, the Kremlin said. Georgia had already signed the agreement.

A simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted into war more than a week ago, when Georgia launched an assault to retake its separatist province of South Ossetia, prompting a huge counter-offensive from Moscow, which supports the rebels.

Russia’s General Staff denied carrying out the bridge attack, declaring that hostilities that flared nine days ago around South Ossetia were, as far as it was concerned, over.

One end of the bridge, near the town of Kaspi, had collapsed into the riverbank in a pile of rubble and twisted steel, pictures filmed by a Reuters television crew showed.

"We are now in peacetime. Why should we be blowing up bridges when our job is to restore ?" Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the General Staff, told a daily official briefing in Moscow. "This therefore can only be yet another completely unverified statement.’

In Sochi, Kremlin chief spokeswoman Natalia Timakova said: "The president informed participants of the (Russian National) Security Council meeting that he had just now signed the six-point plan (to end hostilities)."

But Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze suggested Russian military operations, which have seen troops fan out from the South Ossetia into the Georgian heartland, were far from over. He said Russian soldiers had blown up the bridge, west of the capital Tbilisi, early yesterday afternoon.

"That bridge being gone effectively results in the country losing east-west railway communications. For how long I do not know," he told reporters. — Reuters.

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