Father of Murdered Teen Speaks about Pressure from Policemen
By Tea Mariamidze
Tuesday, January 8
Zaza Saralidze, the father of the murdered teenager Davit Saralidze, claims certain police officers threatened him with the arrest of the participants of the protest rallies, underway in central Tbilisi since May.
Saralidze and his lawyer Nestan Londaridze filed a statement at the Vake-Saburtalo district police department regarding the issue.
The father of the killed teenager assures that on January 3, two policemen, dressed in civilian form, one of them Vake-Saburtalo police department head Giorgi Gadelia, told Saralidze that they would arrest him, his brother, the other organizer of the rallies Malkhaz Machalikashvili and two of their supporters - Irma Simonishvili and Nugzar Kuchashvili for hooliganism.
“There have been so many facts since September 11th, so much violation has been committed against us that I do not even know which ones are being investigated and which are not. Why the police threatened the rally participants? I went to the police department to find that out,” Saralidze stressed.
Irma Simonishvili and Nugzar Kuchashvili are Saralize’s main witnesses at the trial, so the man doubts that the threats from the police aimed at intimidating the witnesses.
“Police promised me to find out the truth but the question is if they really will do that,” he said.
Saralidze’s son Davit and another teenager, Levan Dadunashvili, were both stabbed to death in a fight between schoolboys on Khorava Street on December 1, 2017.
On May 31, Tbilisi City Court charged two minors in connection to the murders - one for the premeditated murder of Dadunashvili and the second for the attempted murder of Saralidze; however, the court stated that they could not determine who exactly had killed Saralidze, which sparked mass protests in the capital on the suspicion of an intentional cover-up.
Saralidze has many times asked the authorities to deliver concrete results and arrest his son’s killers and all the people involved, claiming he will not stop until all the offenders are held responsible.
