TBILISI, December 12 (RIA Novosti) - The Georgian Prosecutor General’s Office has received more than 7,000 complaints from the public since late October, Chief Prosecutor Archil Kbilashvili said on Wednesday.
The complaints are chiefly over human rights violations by Georgia’s previous government, which was voted out of office in October parliamentary elections. More than 1,000 of those complaints concern prison torture and harassment, he said.
In mid-November Georgia’s former defense and interior minister Bacho Akhalaya was charged with false imprisonment and torture.
The prosecution alleged that in February 2010, on Akhalaya’s orders, 19 servicemen were locked up in a bathhouse for “indiscipline,” where they spent three nights without food or heating.
Akhalaya was detained along with another two military officials over charges of abuse of office, degrading treatment, physical and verbal abuse of subordinates, false imprisonment and torture.
Akhalaya was dismissed as interior minister in late September as protests in Tbilisi over claims that inmates at a correctional facility in Tbilisi, Gldani Prison Number 8, were tortured, entered their third day.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili vowed to punish all those responsible for torture.
