7 of 8 detained in MP’s personal footage leak receive bail, one imprisoned
The MIA arrested 17 people in total after MP Eka Beselia said on January 28 that footage of her personal life recorded under the United National Movement leadership had gone viral.
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A Tbilisi judge has given seven of eight individuals arrested for the distribution and possession of an MP’s private life footage bail yesterday and sent one to pre-trial detention.
Zurab Solomonashvili who was sentenced to imprisonment is accused in uploading the footage on YouTube. Other seven person were accused in spreading the footage via social network and messaging apps.
Ministry of Internal Affairs arrested 17 people in total regarding the personal footage case after the statement of Georgian Dream ruling party MP Eka Beselia, who said on 28 January that footage of her personal life recorded under the United National Movement leadership had gone viral.
Three out of 17 detained were sentenced to imprisonment, 14 released on bail.
Recording, storing and release of the footage related to an individual's personal life is a crime which is punishable by imprisonment from four to eight years.
Prosecutor's office demanded imprisonment as the preventive measure for all the eight accused at yesterday's hearing.
As for Zurab Solomonashvili who has been accused of uploading the footage and imprisoned, his lawyer said that he ded not upload the footage on YouTube personally. He did not exclude that someone used Solomanshvili's user account to upload the video.
The court decision is not justified regarding Solomonashvili. We are going to appeal,” the lawyer Mukhran Gurtskaia said.
Eka Beselia herself believes that the investigators should be ‘fair and humanistic’ towards those accused who are ‘'less guilty in what happened’. She said it should be far more important for the investigators to reveal who is standing behind the ‘illegal campaign and moral terror’.
One has been detained for uploading intimate private footage on YouTube after the statement of Georgian Dream ruling party MP Eka Beselia, who said on 28 January that footage of her personal life recorded under the United National Movement leadership had gone viral. The individual has acknowledged his guilt in the matter.
The Georgian media reports that “most of the individuals” who have been detained today for the possession and release of private footage are activists of the United National Movement (UNM) and Girchi opposition parties.
Georgia Dream ruling party member Eka Beselia, who left the post of the head of the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee at the end of December, says that she is facing a moral terror as footage of her personal life has gone viral.
French police, with the cooperation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, have arrested members of a criminal group. 10 among the detainees are Georgians. Two of them are criminal bosses.
The Georgian Interior Ministry is very likely to request help from foreign partners to investigate leak of a private life footage, featuring Georgian Dream MP Eka Beslia.
One person has been detained for uploading the private footage of a Georgian politician on YouTube late yesterday, Deputy Interior Minister Natia Mezvrishvili said. She stated that the individual had no private motivation to upload the video, and, consequently, the crime had no client.
Through cooperation with Facebook administration the MIA has found out that the accused had been registered on Facebook under the user name Buba Lomtatidze and has released personal footage for several times in January.