From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24  (Original Message)    Sent: 9/28/2007 7:22 AM
GEORGIAN EX-MINISTER ARRESTED AFTER DENOUNCING PRESIDENT

Police swoop following former minister Irakli Okruashvili’s lurid allegations
about the Georgian president.

By David Paichadze in Tbilisi

Former Georgian defence minister Irakli Okruashvili was arrested on September
27, two days after dramatically denouncing his ex-ally and boss, President
Mikheil Saakashvili.

Okruashvili was detained in the offices of his newly-formed party, the Movement
for a United Georgia. He was charged with four criminal offences – extortion,
money laundering, abuse of office and “exceeding professional duties”.

According to his lawyer, he denies all the charges.

His driver and several of his bodyguards were also arrested. Police searched
Okruashvili’s apartment and family home.

Around 200 of the former minister’s supporters gathered outside the new party’s
headquarters to protest against the arrest, and his political allies called for
a public protest outside parliament on September 28.

Government critics appeared on a late-night talk-show on the Imedi television
channel to declare that Okruashvili was a "political prisoner".

Georgians had long expected Okruashvili, a former interior and defence minister
who fell out with President Saakishvili in October 2006, to attempt a return to
politics. But few expected him to do it with such publicity and so much venom.

Okruashvili used the televised launch of his Movement for a United Georgia on
September 25 to accuse Saakashvili of an extraordinary litany of crimes. The
president, he said, had tried to get him to murder political opponents, harmed
the Georgian church, covered up the truth about the death of a former prime
minister, and blocked a plan to restore government control over secessionist
territories.

Saakashvili was responsible for “daily repression, the destruction of houses and
churches, robberies, dispossessions, murders and intimidations”, he said.

The TV station he chose as a vehicle was Imedi Television, which belongs to
Badri Patarkatsishvili, a businessman close to exiled Russian oligarch Boris
Berezovsky.

Okruashvili alleged that in 2005, Saakashvili asked him to kill Patarkatsishvili
with a car bomb – as had just happened to Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

“The president still sees Patarkatsishvili as a threat,” said Okruashvili.
“Saakashvili told me he should be got rid of the way it happened to Rafik
Hariri.”

Another allegation that might just create a more damaging impression among
voters is the charge that Saakashvili has built up a large business empire,
despite the promises to fight corruption that helped sweep him to power in the
2003 revolution.

His political career has run parallel to that of Saakashvili himself, and they
were allies until Okruashvili quit the government.