Georgia’s former security chief sentenced to five years in jail

The former head of Georgia’s State Security Service Soso Gogashvili has been sentenced to five years in prison.

The Tbilisi City Court found Gogashvili guilty on five articles of the criminal code, particularly illegal possession of weapons, Novosti-Georgia reports.

The investigation was said to reveal that while in office from 2015 to 2018, Gogashvili took advantage of access to information and shared some classified information with another person, deliberately divulging state secrets.

As reported, he illegally obtained video footage of the private lives of several persons and to have illegally acquired and stored several firearms and ammunition, some of which were registered in the name of a relative.

Gogashvili was detained in July 2022. A few days before his detention, footage from an editorial meeting of the opposition Mtavari TV channel emerged. They suggested that Gogashvili was providing material for investigative journalism.

Before his arrest, Gogashvili wrote on his Facebook that he had dirt on the incumbent authorities. Already in custody, he continued to divulge the information.

For example, he outlined the system of covert eavesdropping, stating that 2,000 operatives are involved in this work alone and that materials are allegedly handed over to the co-founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Gogashvili's lawyer said he had managed to hand over documents with evidence of fraud in the country's last local elections in the autumn of 2021 before he was detained.

Local authorities called Gogashvili's claim "absurd" and an attempt to evade responsibility.