Ex-Senior Security Official, 4 Others Arrested for Allegedly Making Politicians’ Sex Tapes

Former deputy head of the Constitutional Security Department (CSD) under the Interior Ministry and four other former security and police officers were arrested on charges related to secretly recording sex videos of politicians in 2012, which were released anonymously online on March 11 and March 14, the Georgian Prosecutor’s Office said.

One former senior police officer also faces charges in the same case, but he remains at large, prosecutor’s office said.

Judging from statement of the prosecutor’s office the arrests and charges are related specifically to the fact of illegal surveillance through which these two recordings were made four years ago, and not, at least for now, to the case related specifically to the release of those two recordings on March 11 and March 14. Prosecutor’s Office said that the investigation continues into the case of illegal “obtaining and release” of recordings of private lives.

A sex tape, purportedly showing one of the opposition politicians, was anonymously posted on YouTube on March 11. A separate sex tape, also purportedly showing a politician, was distributed online three days later, which was also accompanied by a threat to three other politicians – two cabinet members and one opposition figure, as well as to a TV journalist, that their sex tapes will also be released if they refuse to quit politics and journalism.

Prosecutor’s Office said that one of the tapes was recorded in May, 2012 in an unspecified hotel in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region and another one in a home in Tbilisi, where hidden camera was placed in early June, 2012.

It said that illegal surveillance over opposition figures and filming their private lives was ordered by then deputy head of the Constitutional Security Department (CSD), Vazha Leluashvili, who is among five men arrested on April 8. Leluashvili was a member of parliament in 1999-2004.

Four others are former head of CSD’s Tbilisi unit and an officer from the same unit, as well as two senior officers from the Tbilisi police department.

“Upon instructions from the ex-deputy director of CSD [Vazha Leluashvili], employees of the same department were carrying out illegal surveillance in 2011-2012 for obtaining recordings of private lives of politicians and public figures with dissent opinion for the purpose of gathering compromising material against them,” the Prosecutor’s Office said.

Prosecutor Koka Katsitadze told journalists on April 8, that the arrested men deny charges.

Vazha Leluashvili, ex-deputy head of CSD (the department was renamed into State Security Service after the change of government in late 2012 and was separated from the Interior Ministry in 2015), is already on trial in connection to a separate case, involving allegation of illegal surveillance over then opposition Georgian Dream figures through hacking computers. Those charges against him were brought in late 2012, when he was arrested shortly after the GD came into power; he was then released on bail, and the court hearings are still ongoing. There had been long-standing speculation that Leluashvili, who denies charges, was successful in avoiding prosecution as he was covertly cooperating with certain elements within the GD government.

This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian) Русский (Russian)