Tbilisi City Court has sentenced former Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili to seven years in prison after finding him guilty of exceeding his official powers in the 2004 killing of Amiran (Buta) Robakidze, when he briefly served as Interior Minister.
Okruashvili, who is already jailed after receiving an eight-month sentence in July for refusing to appear before the controversial parliamentary commission, will ultimately serve four years and five months, as the verdict was partly covered by amnesty and further reduced by ten months he served after the 2019 Gavrilov Night case, as well as his current detention, according to RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.
In this case, the court acquitted former Prosecutor General Zurab Adeishvili, who at the time oversaw the investigation into Buta Robakidze’s killing. Adeishvili left Georgia for Hungary after the Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012. He has been wanted by Georgian authorities since 2013 on various charges, although Interpol withdrew its red notice for him in 2015.
The charges against Okruashvili and Adeishvili in the case were brought in 2019, when the Prosecutor’s Office accused Okruashvili of directing officials to cover up the circumstances surrounding the 19-year-old’s death.
According to prosecutors, after learning that a patrol officer had fatally shot Robakidze during a late-night vehicle inspection, Okruashvili instructed senior Interior Ministry officials to protect the image of the patrol police and to classify the incident as an armed group’s attack on law enforcement. The prosecutors said ministry officials then planted firearms and ammunition in the car carrying Robakidze and his friends to support the fabricated narrative.
On November 23, 2004, Buta Robakidze was fatally shot by a patrol officer. Authorities initially claimed that Robakidze and his companions were an armed group and that the officers had acted in self-defense.
However, the self-defense claim unraveled after patrol officer Grigol Bashaleishvili admitted he had accidentally shot Robakidze, who was unarmed. Bashaleishvili was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to four years in prison for negligent murder.
The case was reopened in 2013, a year after Georgian Dream came to power. In 2018, the Tbilisi City Court convicted five former Interior Ministry Officials of exceeding their official powers in connection with the incident.
Buta Robakidze’s family repeatedly insisted that those responsible for fabricating evidence and orchestrating the misleading media coverage be held accountable. They pointed to senior officials in the Interior Ministry’s press service, including Guram Donadze, who managed the Patrol Police program, and Zurab Mikadze, then chief of the Patrol Police.
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