Man assaulting Girchi More Freedom leader denied bail

Gori district court in central Georgia on Monday denied bail for Soso Maisuradze, a suspect who was last week arrested for an assault on Zurab Japaridze, the leader of the Girchi – More Freedom opposition party, at the Smart supermarket chain in Gori. 

The opposition politician was driving to Borjomi, in south-eastern Georgia, to deliver a lecture in a camp organized by the Franklin Club – an organization founded about two years ago to “promote classical liberal and libertarian values”, and offering  lectures and workshops at the Tbilisi-based University of Georgia.

The club has been demonized by the government officials over the past several months, with prime minister Irakli Garibashvili in March calling it an “anarchist movement”, before claiming it had been set up in the university founded by Giuli Alasania, the mother of the currently imprisoned former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili.

Along with the attack on Japaridze on June 17,the members of the Georgia First of All, a far-right movement founded by Vato Shakarishvili, a former member of the ruling Georgia Dream party, broke into the Franklin camp and threw stones and eggs at the hotel that housed the youth and the members of the club, and verbally abused the people there.

Shakarishvili, who has been engaged in demonizing the west in the public eyes, posted the same day, following the violence against Japaridze, that the latter had been assaulted for “insulting the Patriarch and the church” and that “Zura [Japaridze] remained. pants down and had to go back to Tbilisi”.