Chief Prosecutor personally investigates how secret video leaked online

Georgian officials are investigating how a secret video showing the torture and sexual abuse of two inmates by law enforcement officers in 2011 was this week leaked on the internet.

The video was part of an earlier criminal case and stored securely at the Chief Prosecutor’s Office.

The country’s Chief Prosecutor Giorgi Badashvili said he had taken the case under his personal control.

On October 17 a graphic video of sexual abuse and torture of two Georgian detainees was posted on a Ukraine-based video sharing website. The video showed how prison officials tortured inmates in order to gain fake testimony from them.

The video was part of 635 CDs containing more than 750 hours of secret video recordings found by current authorities in an arms cache in western Georgia in 2013. Some of the recordings were extremely graphic in nature and featured sexual relations including homosexual activity and out-of-marriage-sex filmed from hotel rooms and other locations.

Current authorities destroyed a selection of the secret videos while the rest were sent to the Prosecutor’s Office for investigation.

The files that were not destroyed included recordings of private conversations by celebrities, politicians and journalists, as well as videos showing the torture of detainees made by then-Interior Ministry officials.

In March 2014, 11 ex-officials were found guilty, some in absentia, of illegally filming and hiding the secret cache of recordings among weapons storage.

Today the Chief Prosecutor Badashvili said it needed to be investigated how the secret video leaked on the internet and how it reached Ukraine in the first place.

Badashvili stressed the Chief Prosecutor’s Office was not the only body in possession of the controversial video. He said the video, which was a piece of evidence in the detainees’ torture case, was also in the possession of the defence.

This fact was also stressed by Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili yesterday. He said copies of the video were available to all parties involved in the criminal case, and he believed a version of the video had been sold to someone or several people in Ukraine.

"There are many different possibilities of how this video could be distributed, including the video that was sold by representatives of the previous authorities to Ukrainian citizens and so on – I do not want to go into details,” he said.

"An investigation will probably find out how this video footage was distributed, but more important to note is that this clearly demonstrates once again that the previous government, [ex-President Mikheil] Saakashvili’s regime, was – and I do not want to speak about it – a sadistic regime that tortured its own population brutally.”