Police have detained 12 people in Tbilisi and western Georgia on prostitution-related charges. According to local media, a Georgian singer is among those jailed.
Tornike Marsagishvili, head of the Department of Organised Crime at the Interior Ministry, announced the special operation at a briefing on Wednesday.
According to him, over the past 24 hours, the police detained both Georgian and Chinese citizens in the Georgian capital and the Samegrelo region on charges of facilitating prostitution.
As part of the operation, law enforcement officers shut down 13 establishments. According to the ministry, the managers and administrators of these venues ‘systematically facilitated’ women involved in prostitution; specifically, they provided the premises in exchange for money and assisted in ‘finding clients’.
‘During the searches conducted, law enforcement officers seized money allegedly obtained from facilitating prostitution as evidence’, the statement read.
The ministry also released a video, which apparently shows recorded conversations with workers at the now-closed establishments during ‘covert investigative operations’.
According to the video, at least some of the targeted establishments were operating as massage salons.
Shortly after the official statement, several media outlets, including the pro-government TV channel Imedi and the opposition-leaning TV Pirveli, reported that the detainees included singer Khatia Tsereteli.
Tsereteli became known to the wider public in the early 2010s, in part through her participation in the Georgian version of Got Talent. Since then, she has periodically appeared on various television channels and online with her music, as well as sharing personal life stories on entertainment shows and in tabloids.
The detainees face up to four years in prison.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
