Tbilisi City Court has sentenced former Minister of Internal Affairs Irakli Okruashvili to 7 years in prison in the case of the murder of Buta Robakidze, while former Prosecutor General Zurab Adeishvili, who was also charged in the case, was acquitted. Okruashvili’s lawyer, Mamuka Chabashvili, confirmed this information to "InterpressNews".

According to the lawyer, the defense will appeal the court’s decision to the Court of Appeals.

As Mamuka Chabashvili told "InterpressNews", Okruashvili was charged with abuse of power.

According to the lawyer, the case against Irakli Okruashvili has been ongoing since the end of 2019.

The defense intends to challenge the judgment at the higher court.

“Irakli Okruashvili was accused of abuse of power. A guilty verdict has been issued — a sentence of seven years,”Chabashvili stated.

He explained what Okruashvili was accused of:

“In 2004, a patrol police officer accidentally discharged a firearm, and Buta Robakidze died. At the time, it was announced that weapons had been found on Robakidze’s companions. Later there were claims that the weapons had been planted. A then–high-ranking police official — the head of the Tbilisi Patrol Police, Temur Mikadze, who has since passed away — changed his testimony several times.

In 2019, in one of his statements — for which he received a plea bargain and was released from prison — he claimed that the Minister of Internal Affairs (Okruashvili) called him and told him to give an interview stating that a confrontation took place between the patrol and Robakidze’s group. He said that since the minister told him this, he assumed it meant that weapons had to be planted on those individuals.”

“The verdict states that Irakli Okruashvili ordered the planting of weapons — based on Mikadze’s statement that he personally interpreted the instruction that way. Previously, he had given completely different testimonies. You cannot issue a verdict based on ‘I understood it that way’,” the lawyer Mamuka Chabashvili said.