Georgian security services arrest former senior prison official for ‘staging’ Bachiashvili beating

Georgia’s State Security Service (SSG) has arrested a former senior prison official, accusing him of taking part in an alleged plot to stage the prison beating of prominent government critic Giorgi Bachiashvili.

Giorgi Kemoklidze, the former deputy head of the Special Penitentiary Service’s prison department, was arrested by SSG officers on Thursday. At a press conference later that evening, the SSG said Kemoklidze had conspired with Bachiashvili to stage the beating, according to IPN.

The arrest came just a day after another former official apparently implicated in the investigation, the former head of Gldani Prison Davit Gogoberishvili, was found dead in Tbilisi in what the authorities are investigating as a suicide.

In their statement on Thursday, the SSG reportedly said the goal of the ‘staged’ beating was to ‘use this fabricated information to Bachiashvili’s advantage — both for internal public relations and in legal proceedings, including at the European Court of Human Rights’.

‘As planned, the incident was subsequently circulated by various media outlets as though the prisoner Bachiashvili had been beaten, which, in turn, first and foremost served Giorgi Bachiashvili’s interests and was the main purpose of the staged event’, they added.

The SSG accused Kemoklidze of helping to place two ‘specially selected prisoners’ in Bachiashvili’s cell ‘who were supposed to stage a simulated beating’. After they ‘failed to carry out’ the plan, the conspirators allegedly replaced the two with a third prisoner.

‘Immediately upon entering, Bachiashvili — recalling the previous experience — began a confrontation with [the third prisoner] without any apparent reason, leading to a minor physical altercation between them’, they reportedly claimed.

They also accused Kemoklidze of ordering that surveillance cameras outside the cell be disabled.

Kemoklidze has been charged with abuse of official powers, which carries a sentence of up to three years in prison.

In a message from prison delivered by his lawyer, Levan Makharashvili, Bachiashvili described the accusation that he staged his own beating as ‘absurd’, TV Pirveli has reported.

Makharashvili added that they had requested that Bachiashvili be placed in his own cell before the incident, ‘since such risks could theoretically arise’, but that the request was ignored. He also said that they had repeatedly insisted that video recordings from the incident be retrieved, ‘and now it turns out they have been deleted’.

Ivanishvili ‘resorting to racketeering’

Critics of the government have raised doubts about the official version of events.

On Friday, Tina Bokuchava, the chair of the opposition United National Movement (UNM) party, said she believed it was ‘not credible’ that Gogoberishvili had taken his own life, comparing the case to the purported suicide of former Adjara Head Tornike Rizhvadze.

According to IPN, she said Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili was facing ‘a significant financial crisis’ due to current and potential future sanctions imposed on him.

‘To keep his repressive machine operating, he needs vast amounts of money every day — money he will not be able to access from financial institutions because of these sanctions. Therefore, he’s resorting to racketeering former officials and people close to him to extract that money. He considers Bachiashvili one of them and is using all forms of terror to extract it’, she said.

Bachiashvili is a prominent businessperson and former close confidant of Ivanishvili, having previously headed the Ivanishvili-backed Georgian Co-Investment Fund.

In March, he slipped out of Georgia, where he had been placed under criminal investigation. He vowed to expose the authorities, stating that ‘Ivanishvili’s regime has completely deviated from the principles of law and democracy’.

A day after the Guardian published a wide-ranging interview with Bachiashvili, Georgian security services said they had arrested him on the Georgia–Armenia border. Bachiashvili, who was believed to have been living in the UAE, said he was ‘forcibly returned’ from exile.

In July, he said he had been brutally beaten in his cell, following a warning from Gldani Prison head Gogoberishvili. You

Bachiashvili said Gogoberishvili had advised him to disclose his bank account information, cryptocurrency transactions, and wallet addresses to Ivanishvili. Bachiashvili is serving an 11-year sentence on charges of embezzling bitcoin allegedly belonging to Ivanishvili.

Both Gogoberishvili and Kemoklidze resigned on 21 August, after an investigation by the Penitentiary Service claimed to have found evidence that they had conspired with Bachiashvili over the beating. The head of the Penitentiary Service, Bezhan Obgaidze, resigned the following day.