Three minors — Aleksandre Gabashvili, Giorgi Rikadze, and Demetre Chikovani — have been convicted of the fatal beating of 28-year-old tutor Giga Avaliani in Tbilisi in October 2025.
On Wednesday, a Tbilisi court sentenced Gabashvili and Rikadze to 14 years in prison and Chikovani to nine years, but under Georgian juvenile law, the sentences will be automatically reduced by one-fourth, meaning Gabishvili and Rikadze will serve 10.5 years and Chikovani six year and nine months.
In October 2025, Avaliani had been cornered by the group, along with other individuals, and struck in the head, after which he fell to the ground and lost consciousness. He died of his injuries a few weeks later.
According to the investigators, it was a premeditated assault which occurred after Gabashvili received a call from a female friend who said that Avaliani, with whom she was taking private math lessons, had been showing her ‘excessive attention’.
Later, in February 2026, prosecutors said the three minors had been involved in several other similar crimes, specifically singling out people they considered ‘undesirable’ and then brutally assaulting them.
‘Giorgi Rikadze, Demetre Chikhovani, Aleksandre Gabashvili, and others used various means of communication to contact selected victims while posing as girls, luring them outside and arranging meetings at pre-selected times and locations. They would then ambush the victims and physically assault them as a group, subjecting them to ruthless beatings and verbal abuse’, the agency noted.
The Prosecutor General’s Office added that the group ‘recorded the assaults on camera, stored the footage of the violence on their mobile phones, and shared it within targeted groups’. The agency cited four violent episodes as examples, which took place over the course of 2025, including one in September, shortly before the attack on Avaliani.
The convictions and subsequent prison sentences covered both the fatal beating of Avaliani and four other assaults.
Mikheil Gvadzabia
