Georgia’s State Security Service (SSG) has terminated its investigation into the 45-minute outage of the pro-government television channel Imedi on Monday, concluding that it was due to a ‘technical malfunction’. The SSG had launched an investigation on Tuesday into the issue, suspecting the outage may have been due to ‘sabotage’.
The SSG said on Wednesday that experts had found the outage was caused by ‘a technical fault in one of the internal electrical devices’ at the TV station.
There was no foul play suspected, the SSG added.
On Monday evening, Imedi reported on Facebook that their broadcasting had been ‘suddenly cut off [at 17:48] for approximately 45 minutes for an unknown reason’.
Their statement emphasised that they did not rule out the possibility the malfunction was a ‘criminal act against the channel’, and therefore contacted law enforcement agencies.
Subsequently, the SSG announced they were launching an investigation under the article of sabotage, defined as ‘obstructing the normal functioning of a state or other enterprise, institution, organisation, or service for the purpose of weakening Georgia’. The crime carries a penalty of two to four years in prison.
The SSG’s Tuesday statement also noted that broadcasting had been stopped for two other companies — Maestro and GDS — both owned by Imedi’s parent company TeleImedi.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
