Occupied Abkhazia representatives leave Gali meeting as Tbilisi refuses to remove murder case from agenda

The representatives of Georgia’s occupied Abkhazia region have left the Gali Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) meeting today in protest as delegates from the government of Georgia refused to remove the Giga Otkhozoria’s murder case from the agenda.

They [Abkhazians] raised an ultimatum over the removal of Rashid Kanjiogli’s issue from the agenda, of the man who was sentenced in absentia by a Georgian court for the murder of Giga Otkhozoria in 2015,” the representative of Georgia’s State Security Service Irakli Antadze said.

We responded that the issue of the handover and punishment of Kanjiogli is principally important for the government of Georgia and that we do not intend to remove the case.  After hearing the response representatives of Abkhazia and Russia quit the meeting in protest,” Antadze said.

Antadze says that Abkhazia and Russia also protested against the Otkhozoria-Tatunashvili list, which includes people who have violated the rights of Georgian citizens in the country’s occupied regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali (South Ossetia) since the 1990s.

The IPRM meetings concerning Georgian conflict issues were restored in 2016 after a four-year break, and the first topic of the meeting was Otkhozoria’s brutal murder in May 2015.

The date of the next IPRM meeting remains unknown.