TBILISI – The Tbilisi City Court has issued an arrest warrant for Giorgi Rusitashvili, a former Georgian soldier currently living in Ukraine who has been charged threatening Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili’s son, Teimuraz Gorjestani, on social media.
Lawyer Nino Mchedlishvili told journalists that Rusitashvili, her client, had accused Zurabishvili of betraying Georgia’s interests in a comment on the latter’s page and later, during the presidential campaign, talked to Gorjestani on the phone.
“My client confirms that his conversation with Gorjestani was tough. Rusitashvili later left several more comments on Zurabishvili’s and Gorjestani’s pages, but those comments did not contain any particular threat,” she said.
Rusitashvili said he believed the criminal case opened against him by the Georgian Interior Ministry was part of a PR strategy during Zurabishvili’s campaign, as she publicly stated at the time that a former Georgian soldier staying in Ukraine had threatened her and her family with physical violence, Mchedlishvili said.
Rusitashvili said in a telephone interview with the television channel Rustavi 2 that not only he, but all Georgian military personnel were outraged by Zurabishvili’s remarks that it was Georgia and not Russia that started the military conflict in South Ossetia in August 2008.
“This is an openly treacherous statement, as I wrote on Salome Zurabishvili’s social accounts,” Rusitashvili said.
He also confirmed that he was wanted by Russian authorities for fighting for a Georgian Defense Ministry special taskforce in the 2008 war.
