Secret services thwarted plot to kill TV host who attacked Putin, Georgia says
Georgia has thwarted a plot to assassinate a journalist who made an expletive-laden attack on Vladimir Putin on live television last year, the Georgian prime minister said.
“Georgian secret services have foiled a very serious crime,” Giorgi Gakharia told journalists on Tuesday.
He was responding to allegations by the director of a pro-opposition TV station that a Russian hitman had been sent to Georgia to assassinate Giorgi Gabunia after the TV host’s attack on the Russian president.
The director of Mtavari TV, Nika Gvaramia, said that, according to an anonymous source, a Russian man named Vasambeg Bokov had been dispatched to the former Soviet country to carry out the killing. According to his source, the assassination was ordered by the leader of Russia’s Chechen
Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, Gvaramia said.
Georgia’s state security service announced on Monday it had detained an “ethnic-Ingush Russian national, VB, for using fake identification documents”, and said the arrest was made “within the framework of an investigation into plotting a murder”.
Georgia’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said that “plotting to assassinate a journalist is absolutely unacceptable”.
Gabunia’s tirade against Putin in
Russian in July last year sparked fury in Moscow. Speaking in Russian on Georgia’s Rustavi 2 TV station, he had called Putin a “filthy invader” and insulted the Russian president’s mother using coarse language, before adding “Oh, your mother’s dead … Let her burn in hell with you and your father.”
A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, called the assassination allegations “absurd”, and Kadyrov denied the claims in a post on his Telegram channel. The Chechen leader wrote: “Believe me, if someone is acting on my orders, he will accomplish them, and if a mission is to be accomplished quietly, nobody will not learn about it.”
He said the journalist should kneel and apologise “or else, I repeat that he will remain my enemy”.
Russia and Georgia have long been at loggerheads over Tbilisi’s drive to forge closer ties with the European Union and Nato. They waged a brief but bloody war in August 2008 over
Georgia’s Moscow-backed separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in which Russian forces occupied swathes of Georgia’s territory and bombed military and civilian targets. Russia withdrew from Georgia only after an EUmediated ceasefire.
After the war, Moscow recognised both separatist regions as independent states and stationed permanent military bases there, while Georgia reacted by cutting diplomatic relations with its former master.