Who killed the “banker”?

10/03/2006 Yuri SIMONYAN

The oppositional parties of Georgia were about to raise the issue of impeaching the minister of Georgian internal affairs Vano Meribashvili but later they changed their mind. Currently in such a situation of difference of parliamentary powers this can hardly reach success: the majority will not allow them to harm anyone backed by the president. They are going to continue struggling another way. But they don’t say yet how they are going to do that.
The oppositional powers are confused because of the ministers’ speech in the parliament, who had been invited there due to the initiative taken by the opposition. Merabishvili didn’t answer to any of their questions by saying that the investigation was confidential and instead of this he spoke about the achievements of his ministry. When concluding his speech he made a hint: “We have lost 19 policemen, but instead of this only 18 criminals were killed here. Probably the opposition would feel better if the numbers were changed with the places”. After this foolish announcement the opposition jointly stood up and left the hall.

The mentioned issues concern the crimes that shocked the Georgian society. At the end of January, the body of Georgian bank employee (Sandro Gvirgvliani) was found somewhere in Georgia. The employee was severely injured. Just the next day all of Tbilisi knew what had happened. That day Gvirgvliani was sitting in the famous “Sharden” café with his friend, where he had a conflict with a group of high ranked police officers. The officers took both of them out of the city, but his friend escaped. As for Gvirgvliani, they beat him to death. There are certain names too, but I will not mention those names because of the innocence note mentioned by Merabishvili. They have instituted legal proceedings. The opposition is sure that these legal proceedings are not objective. For instance an oppositionist says that when questioning the friend of the killed person, who could hardly escape from the place, he was not shown the pictures of the suspected people. “I have personally found a picture of one of those officials and Bukhadze recognized one of the officials that beat them in that picture”, said Mr. Dzidzigouri.

The ombudsman of Georgia, Sozar Subari has sent an open letter to minister Merabishvili, which petitions him to fire the head of the PR department of the ministry, Duram Donadze without waiting for the results of the investigation, who was in “Sharden” café too that day. “Just the next day of the incident Dunadze announced that this murder was connected with the conflict of criminal groups. These kinds of announcements made in the first phase of the investigation process can be considered as an attempt to disorient the investigation process”, states the letter. Even more, the announcement of the ombudsman regarding the mother of Gvirgvliani was discussed more after the speech made during the session of the young lawyers’ association. The ombudsman said that the announcement of the official representative of the ministry was an attempt to threaten the mother of the killed person. “Generally it is his style to threaten when speaking to journalists and to people. Besides that the project that he created and found a department of territorial inspectors totally violates the note of innocence”, says Sozar Suzari.

Representative of the parliamentarian majority and the head of the parliamentary commission on human rights protection, Elena Tevdoradze joined the ombudsman too. According to Mrs. Elena she has a lot of facts that bring up a lot of cases of human rights violations by Guram Donadze. These facts show that innocent citizens have been beaten and that they have been intimidated. It is very interesting that recently Donadze used to work actively for “Rustavi-2” TV company as a journalist. This kind of mysterious transformation has happened in Georgia…
The opposition has made an announcement, according to which they are planning on founding a monitoring group to follow the investigation process. “We think this murder has political backgrounds like the cases of the murder of George Gongadze in Ukraine and George Sana in Georgia”, states the document.

Nowadays, the “case of Gvirgvliani” is discussed a lot by different groups. But there are new developments connected with this case. Rumor has it that the murdered citizen was drunken and insulted one of the murderers without any reason. Let’s assume that it was like this. Who let them solve their problems in such a way? It is also worth mentioning that I heard about the details of the conflict from an officer and that information is not so accurate: the officer didn’t know that I knew where he worked.