Five people charged for violating privacy
Georgia seeks international help to explain secret sex tapes

Georgia’s law enforcers are intensifying their efforts to investigate the release of illegally recorded sex videos of politicians that have shaken the country for several days.

The Chief Prosecutor’s Office today said Georgia had approached its foreign partners for help – reportedly, including the FBI – to trace the source of the tapes after the latest video was posted on YouTube yesterday.

On another note, today the Office announced five people had been detained for crimes related to other illegally obtained sex videos. A Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson explained the detainees were not charged with uploading the recent videos online but for illegally obtaining and keeping similar videos for the past few years.

One of the arrested people was a former employee of the Interior Ministry’s Constitutional Security Department (commonly referred to as Kudi). Kudi is the domestic-intelligence and special-operations service in Georgia but was abolished after the current ruling Georgian Dream coalition took power in 2012.

The Prosecutor’s Office explained the scheme and said the criminal chain had five links.

Allegedly, at the bottom of the chain was Georgia citizen Gela Ghurtskaia, who in December 2016 brought one illegally filmed sex tape to the editor-in-chief of a Tbilisi-based media holding with the purpose of releasing the recording. The media organisation did not release the tape.

The Prosecutor’s Office said after searching Ghurtskaia’s house police found a memory card with other videos of sexual nature in early 2016.

The Prosecutor’s Office said the investigation into this case revealed in December 2015 Ghurtskaia was contacted by then-Kudi employee Nikoloz Khatchapuridze who offered him money to take the video to the media for public release.

The Office alleged Khatchapuridze obtained the collection of videos from his friend Inga Chatoiani, who was allegedly given the tapes by lawyer Irakli Pkhaladze in summer 2015.

Police searched Pkhaladze’s house on March 12, 2016 to find a laptop containing the same and other explicit videos, all of which the Office believed were filmed before June 2012.

The Office claimed in 2014, Pkhaladze obtained the recordings from Zurab Jamalashvili – the head of the chain - with the purpose of spreading them for financial gain.

Meanwhile Jamalashvili is father of Vasil Jamalashvili, a 22-year-old hacker who was found guilty for a major cyber-crime in 2012. Back then the junior Jamalashvili worked for Kudi, where he created a virus, said police. The virus was illegally was inserted into the computers of Georgian Dream coalition members, which made it possible to eavesdrop on their private phone conversations.

This was followed by a major political scandal in Georgia where private conversations of politicians leaked on the internet in 2012.

The Prosecutor’s Office said all of the people involved in the criminal chain (Ghurtskaia, Khatchapuridze, Chatoiani, Pkhaladze and Jamalashvili) were charged with "personal and family secret infringement”.

Meanwhile, the Prosecutor’s Office also commented on the ongoing investigation on two more recent criminal cases – one involving the release of a sex tape on Friday and the other about the release of a second similar tape on Monday.

The Office said investigators were working closely with YouTube, Google and Facebook to trace those who uploaded and shared the links to the videos. Officials believed through this collaboration it would be possible to find out where the videos were uploaded, either in Georgia or further abroad.

Today Georgia’s Justice Minister Thea Tsulukiani told The Guardian the Government had asked for help from the FBI and a neighbouring country, which she refused to name, to track down the source of the videos.