Tbilisi City Court has sentenced nine people, including six minors, to years-long imprisonment, finding them guilty of brutally assaulting a 15 year-old boy. According to the investigation, the detainees belonged to a ‘fascist’ group.
Judge Tamar Mchedlishvili announced the verdicts for the minors on Tuesday, prompting angry reactions from the relatives of those sentenced. TV Pirveli reported that the decisions for the adult defendants had been announced five days earlier.
The court sentenced all three adults to 10 years each, three of the defendants aged 16–18 to seven and a half years, and three others under 16 to six years and eight months.
All defendants, except one, were charged with collectively and knowingly subjecting a minor to inhuman and degrading treatment. The one exception, according to local media, was the oldest of those detained, 30-year-old Levan Abesadze, whom the prosecution accused of organising the crime.
The Georgian Prosecutor General’s Office first reported the detention of the individuals on 8 July, calling them ‘members of a group with so-called “fascist” ideology’.
The agency stated that the now-jailed individuals lured a minor to an abandoned building in Tbilisi and brutally assaulted him there ‘based on a past verbal altercation’. The investigators noted that the violence occurred in accordance with a ‘premeditated plan’.
‘The defendants forced the victim to kneel under verbal insults and threats with knives and pistols, and while kneeling, inflicted injuries on various parts of the body with a cold weapon, along with physical and verbal abuse’, the Prosecutor General’s Office said.
Furthermore, the investigators said that the individuals forced the boy, under threat, ‘to apologise via a mobile phone video call to the so-called leader of the group’, who, according to media reports, is Abesadze.
‘The defendants recorded a video of the acts degrading the victim’s dignity on a mobile phone and uploaded it to social media’, the Prosecutor General’s Office statement read.
RFE/RL previously reported that Abesadze had been convicted in 2018 for attacking Nigerian citizens in central Tbilisi three years earlier. That time he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Abesadze did not admit to the charges brought against him in the case involving the 15-year-old boy, and his lawyer argued that there was a lack of evidence. The court’s verdict was also contested by the defence of the minors convicted in the case.
OC Media
