Problematic issues identified by the Human Rights Center
The Human Rights Center represents the interests of the legal successor of the victim Tamar Bachaliashvili, a young programmer on the case of her death under suspicious circumstances.
At the moment, the investigation is underway under the article of leading to suicide, which is provided by Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Georgia.
Since the day the body was found (July 22, 2020), the Prosecutor's Office of Georgia, purposefully tries to form a public opinion that Tamar Bachaliashvili committed a suicide.
After Mikheil Ramishvili, a lawyer of Tamar Bachaleishvili's family, took up the case, due to high public interest to the case and number of shortcomings identified during the investigation, at different stages of the investigation, the prosecutor’s office was many times requested to examine not only the evidence supporting the suicide version, but also to conduct a fair and thorough investigation of the case and answer the questions arising from the majority of the public.
According to the position of lawyer Mikheil Ramishvili, and the family of the deceased, it was necessary to conduct investigation under the article of premeditated murder, which would allow the investigation bodies to conduct investigation in different directions and examine direct or indirect evidence that may indicate at Tamar Bachaleishvili's murder.
During this period, instead of taking reciprocal moves by the prosecutor's office and thoroughly investigating the case, media outlets that are close to the government have been actively trying to form a public opinion on the truthfulness of the suicide version. For this purpose, they used personal information of Tamar Bachaliashvili's family members, manipulated events that took place years before the incident, made attempts to discredit the family and people with dissenting opinions, etc.
Unfortunately, in order to form the public opinion, such actions by the prosecutor's office have been actively used in recent years in connection with high-profile cases which had a high public interest (e.g. Khorava Street murder case, Temirlan Machalikashvili’s case). In parallel with the investigation, discrediting victims and their legal successors through various media outlets, disclosing various types of personal information, etc. has become a proven and tested method.
In order to facilitate the establishment of objective truth on the case and monitor procedural actions, from September 7, 2020, a lawyer within HRC, Eka Kobesashvili, is involved in the case as a lawyer of the victim's legal successor.
Up to the date, HRC has identified a number of open issues that are still not examined and may indicate towards the murder of Tamar Bachaliashvili.
Nevertheless, the investigation either does not work at all on such issues or considers them less important facts or circumstances and does not examine them thoroughly.
This document discusses several important issues after analyzing which, HRC demands from the prosecution to reconsider the current assumptions over the case and direct the investigation under the article of premeditated murder.
Tamar Bachaliashvili disappeared on July 18, 2020. She drove out of her residential apartment in Ponichala. Four days later, on July 22, 2020, her body was found in the back seat of her car near the village of Matsevani, Marneuli Municipality.
The investigation still leaves unanswered the question why Tamar Bachaliashvili took this route to commit a suicide and, at the same time, given the testimony of witnesses, why did she try to find a specific location.
In this regard, several additional circumstances are important: on July 18, 2020, Tamar Bachaliashvili left her house (Ponichala settlement) in her own car at around 10:15. She soon entered her grandmother's house in the same settlement, from where she left in 10 minutes and continued her way to Rustavi. Grandmother's house, where Tamar stayed for 10 minutes, was closed because Grandmother was in quarantine. Tamar had the key to the house, and she knew that the owner would not return home for the next few days. Nevertheless, according to the version by the investigation, she moved towards Marneuli for a suicide, for which she drove for 70 kilometers.
The route taken by Bachaliashvili leaves the impression that she was driving to a specific location and was looking for a way to this location. For this purpose, she drove into the village of Golteti, where witnesses say she was looking for another way out of the village.
They could not find Tamar Bachaliashvili's car for four days.
The investigative body claims that Tamar Bachaliashvili's car was parked at the place of her discovery for four days from July 18 to July 22, 2020, about 65 meters from the road in the village of Matsevani which comes after Golteti. The investigation further alleges that the search actions to find Tamar Bachaliashvili's car were continuously underway, including in the places where the car was finally found. Bachaliashvili's relatives and journalists were also looking for the car. According to the case materials, the car was finally found by a shepherd.
Drones were also used to search for Bachaliashvili's car. It is suspicious that the drone search area did not hit the spot where the car was found on July 22.
From the very beginning, the police had information from the witnesses who last saw Tamar Bachaliashvili's car in the village of Golteti, which is located about 3 kilometers from the location where the car was found. Therefore, the fact is also doubtful that drone search was not conducted in Matsevani area.
It is unknown why the investigators did not search Bachaliashvili's whereabouts using a cell phone after receiving a report of her disappearance, which police officers usually do even in the event of a cell phone loss. In accordance with the investigation's version, the phone taken from the scene turned out to be switched off and damaged. According to them, the phone may have been damaged by fluid of the dead body, although such fluid could not be found on the phone at the time of death.
To this date, the investigation has not answered the question of how many dead flies ended up in the closed car.
According to the investigation materials, Tamar Bachaliashvili's car was locked, and all four windows were raised to the end. At the same time, during the investigative activities many dead flies were discovered in the car, which, according to the initial version of the investigation, are so called “bluebottles”. If the windows were not raised to the end, nobody could get surprised to find the bluebottles in the car.
This circumstance indicates that the corpse was in the open space before it was placed in the car, where the presence of similar insects is not an unusual process together with the lewdness. Therefore, this suspicious fact reinforces the assumption that Bachaliashvili’s body was placed on the car later. All flies discovered in the car were dead. The flies could not appear from nowhere. Most probably, they got into the car from outside. Consequently, the investigation shall answer the question of how the flies appeared in the closed saloon of the car. At the same time, another significant circumstance is that presence of similar flies is associated with the lewdness of the corpse. So, they could not get into a closed car of an alive person, before she committed a suicide.
The investigation has never raised this question. However, after Human Rights Center got involved into the case, the investigation had to conduct additional expertise of the insects though the results are not known so far.
Up to the date, the State has been unable to obtain photos taken from the satellite.
The state has so far been unable to obtain satellite photos confirming the fact that Tamar Bachaliashvili's car was parked in the area for four days from the day of her disappearance until she was found.
The photos taken from the satellite, which Davit Purtskhvanidze, the director of the Anti-Crisis Center of Security Problems, sent to Mikheil Ramishvili, the lawyer of the victim's legal successor, turned out to be fabricated, due to which the prosecutor's office arrested Davit Purtskhvanidze on the charges of evidence fabrication and illegal access to the computer of other persons. Moreover, the incompatibility with the current legislation of the acts of initiating an investigation under relevant articles of the Criminal Code, of arresting Purtskhvanidze, and of questioning Bachaliashvili's family as witnesses should be justly assessed as a demonstration of force by the prosecution and pressure on the victim's family and lawyers.
On the other hand, the prosecution states that as part of the investigation carried out into the death of Tamar Bachaliashvili, the Prosecutor's Office of Georgia applied to the relevant services of partner countries, including that of the United States, EuroPol, as well as the following companies to find satellite photos of the location of her car: Land info, Digital globe, Skywatch, L3harris technologies, Eosda, Geocento limited, Orbit logic incorporated, Imagesatintl, Slingshotaerospace, Planet.com, European space imaging, Astro digital, ISI, Satellogic, Ursa space imaging, The European space agency, Landviwer, Spymesat, Airbus, Siis. The Prosecutor's Office states that according to information provided by the relevant US services, EuroPol and some of the companies, they do not have satellite photos of the mentioned area of the interesting time period for the investigation.
The Prosecutor's Office does not specify what kind of responses they got from each of the mentioned company. The lawyers of the victim's family still do not have an answer to the question, what was the content of the messages sent by the prosecutor’s office to each company and what answers they received or did not receive regarding the issue.
Up to the date, the investigation has not questioned the journalist Eliso Kiladze as a witness, who in her public statements refers to the facts important to the case. Among the facts are some referring to villa Algeti and to turning off the lights in village Golteti on the night from July 21 through July 22.
Journalist Eliso Kiladze states that she was informed by a source about possible criminal activities on the territory of villa Algeti near village Golteti, which is related to the alleged murder of Tamar Bachaliashvili.
The journalist names the persons whom the investigation should be interested in and must interrogate.
According to the information, on the night from July 21 through July 22, the electricity was cut off for several hours at night in village Golteti, which may have contributed to the unnoticed transfer of Tamar Bachaliashvili's car and body. Eliso Kiladze names a specific person who turned off the electricity. This person has not been questioned by the investigation to date. In general, an in-depth investigation of the information provided by Eliso Kiladze about this issue is important for the case, but the Prosecutor's Office is passive and does not respond properly to the journalist's public statements.
The investigation did not examine and did not conduct an investigative experiment on the alternative road found by the lawyers of the victim's legal successor, which connects the village of Golteti and Villa Algeti.
The investigation did not conduct an investigative experiment on the forest road connecting the village of Golteti and village Sagrasheni indicated by the defense.
According to the witnesses' testimonies on the case, Tamar Bachaliashvili was last seen in her car in the village of Golteti.
An anonymous source informed journalist Eliso Kiladze that they should start examining Bachaliashvili's case from Villa Algeti, which is also located in the village of Sagrasheni in Tetritskaro Municipality. The village of Golteti and the village of Sagrasheni are connected by several kilometers of the main road, where a number of video cameras are installed. At Villa Algeti there is a trout farm that is not currently operational.
With the help of the locals, the lawyers of the victim’s family discovered a secondary road leading through the forest, which enters from the village of Golteti into the territory of the Villa Algeti located in the village of Sagrasheni. The car moves freely on the road and there is no video camera installed anywhere that would record any of such suspicious movements.
The investigation did not get interested in the horizontal scratches on Tamar Bachaliashvili’s car either, though they could have resulted from the car movement through the bushes of the mentioned road.
Besides that, there are few vertical scratches of an animal on the car as well, which reinforces the doubt that if the car had been on the site of its discovery for 4 days, the animals could have damaged it even more particularly when there was a corpse inside. Moreover, the corpse liquid had also leaked through the back door.
Up to the date, the identity of the woman on whom the videofit was produced has not been established.
The identity of the woman has not been established who went to the Tamar Bachaliashvili's place before the funeral to express mourning and apologized vaguely to the body of the deceased and her mother. When the family started asking questions, the woman left the mourning place soon, stopped the taxi and ran away. In order to establish identity of this woman, a videofit was produced for expert examination with the participation of eyewitnesses. The search for a citizen is not actually underway.
It is unclear why the investigation considers the testimony of the shepherd father and son, who found Tamar Bachaliashvili's car near Matsevani, to be credible.
For the victim’s family and defense, the testimony of the shepherd father and son who, according to the case materials, found Tamar Bachaliashvili's car on July 22 is unreliable. According to the testimony of the witnesses, the calves escaped from the herd of cattle of O.M. (the son) and when he went to return the calves, he saw Tamar Bachaliashvili's car, regarding which he had information from the Internet. The witness said that the phone battery was flat and it was disconnected, and decided to go home to inform his father about it personally. The witness also says that when he approached the vehicle road, he accidentally saw his father driving a car and stopped him, telling him about the car he had found. According to the telephone extract on the case files, witness O. M.’s phone recorded some Internet activities during the period when he says that his phone was disconnected.
Further, according to the case files, O.M.'s father - P.M., when learning about the car from his son, called a police officer in Tetritskaro and not the official police number 112.
A story was aired on media resource - inforustavi.ge, where one of the shepherds says that every day, he takes the cattle to that territory and if the car had been there during these days, he would have noticed it. The shepherd also states that as far as he knows Bachaliashvili was murdered and the car was brought to the place on the day it was found.
The next day after the release of the video, this shepherd was taken to the investigative body and interrogated without a lawyer. During the interrogation, the witness changed his position and said that he was very drunk at that time and he could not remember what he was saying. The witness completely denied the information contained in the story. From the post on inforustavi.ge, the citizen does not show any signs of being under alcohol influence. Thus, his last testimony that he was very drunk that day and does not remember what he said is doubtful.
The version of the prosecutor’s office about the route taken by Tamar Bachaliashvili on the date of her decease does not match the testimonies of the witnesses.
At the special briefing, the prosecutor's office published the route of her car movement on the day of Tamar Bachaliashvili's disappearance. The Prosecutor’s Office stated that the route was withdrawn from her Google account with Timeline.
The trustworthy of the route presented by the investigation raise doubts as they contradict the testimonies of many witnesses on the case file. According to the witnesses’ testimonies, Tamar Bachaliashvili was seen driving a car in different places in the village of Golteti. The places indicated by the witnesses are not mentioned in the version of the route submitted by the prosecution. Moreover, the version of the investigation does not mention the village of Matsevani, where, according to one of the witnesses, Tamar Bachaliashvili was driving a car on July 18.
Consequently, the accuracy of the version offered by the investigation raises doubts, which may have essential importance to determine the truth over the death of Bachaliashvili.
No recordings were found on the video cameras installed in the operating restaurant - trout farm Admiral.
According to the witness, he saw Tamar Bachaliashvili in a car on the day of her disappearance, July 18, in the village of Matsveani.
The trout farm restaurant Admiral is the only large commercial entity in the same village. Numerous video cameras are installed on the territory of the restaurant. Nevertheless, the investigation did not conduct investigative activities in the village of Matsevani, among them in the trout farm “Admirali”, based on the testimony of this witness.
In the course of the investigation, the lawyer of Tamar Bachaliashvili’s family – Mikheil Ramishvili personally arrived at the trout-farm and talked with the personnel. During the visit, the staff members of the restaurant told him that the cameras installed inside and outside the building monitor the surrounding territory for 24 hours and they work without a delay.
Pursuant to Mikheil Ramishvili’s request, the investigation body decided to conduct investigative activities in the village of Matsevani and the restaurant Admirali.
It is suspicious that the representatives of the investigative body faced completely different situation on the place: the video-recording system was out of order in the restaurant, and the recordings were erased.
Everybody could easily detect the mechanic damage of the wires.
The administration of the restaurant stated that the video-recordings had been out of order for the past four years and consequently they could not record anything. According to their clarifications, they had the cameras on the building just to scare strangers. With it, they clarified why they had given the wrong information to Mikheil Ramishvili.
Later, the expertise of the video-cameras showed that the wires of the surveillance cameras were cut by a wire-cutter. However, the expertise could not determine when it had happened.
Consequently, the questions about the surveillance camera of the restaurant Admirali were not answered at all; just the opposite, more questions were raised.
Up to the date, the identity of the person to whom belongs the DNA on the face mask removed from Tamar Bachaliashvili's car has not been established.
The investigation has not yet established the identity of the unknown man, whose DNA sample was found on the face mask removed from Tamar Bachaliashvili's car.
It was impossible to determine whom the bloodstains discovered on the left shoe, on both back carpets in the car and on the phone of Tamar Bachaliashvili belonged to. The bloodstains on the two facemasks belonged to Tamar Bachaliashvili.
In accordance with the expertize conclusion in the case files, the bloodstains were discovered on the left shoe of Tamar Bachaliashvili, on both back carpets in her car and on her phone, which belong to a human. However, due to little amount of the sample, the expertise could not determine the genetic profile of the blood.
The investigation cannot clarify either, how the two facemasks were stained with Tamar Bachaliashvili’s blood.
Regardless the judge’s ruling, the investigative activities were conducted with a delay.
Based on the solicitations submitted by the prosecutor’s office on July 27, 2020, on July 28, the judge ruled to withdraw recordings of the surveillance camera installed on private entities located alongside Bachaliashvili’s route. Based on the ruling, the investigation team visited those entities only 11-15 days later (between August 8 and 12). As a result, most of the recordings were already erased.
Similarly dragged out investigative activities and consequently erased evidence raise doubts over the effectiveness and transparency of the measures taken by the investigative body.
Two of the four medicines, which Tamar Bachaliashvili had purchased a day before her disappearance, were not discovered in her blood and in her belongings.
In the first stage of the investigation, the prosecutor’s office published the video-materials showing how Tamar Bachaliashvili was purchasing medicines in different pharmacies to reinforce its version of the suicide and to form the public opinion in this direction. However, the investigation did not pay attention to those significant details, which may be important to determine the truth.
Examination of the case files revealed that on July 17, Tamar Bachaliashvili visited four different pharmacies and purchased four different medicines: Klofelin, Trittiko, Trankvil and Donormil.
However, the expertise of Tamar Bachaliashvili’s body revealed that only two of the four medicines she had purchased in the pharmacies were in her body. At the same time, completely different medicines were discovered in her body. Pursuant to the expertize conclusion, they were: Kardolax, Donormil, Klofelin and Mig 400. Trankvil and Trittiko were neither in her body nor in her belongings discovered in the car.
Why was it impossible to obtain the recordings from the Tsintskaro village located surveillance camera of the 112?
There are questions with regard to the surveillance camera of the 112 service, which is located in Tsintskaro village. In accordance with the case files, there was a surveillance camera of the 112 in the village. However, the investigation could not obtain July 18-22 recordings from it. According to the case files, the recordings of the mentioned camera are available only from July 5 to July 10 and from July 20 to present.
It is noteworthy that, the last video of Tamar Bachaliashvili’s car movement was recorded in Khaishi village, which is located next to Tsintskaro. Therefore, the recordings of the surveillance camera in Tsintskaro could be very important for the investigation. However, as mentioned above, the video camera of the 112 has not recorded the period of time, which is particularly important for the investigation.
Why did not the investigation examine the 10-minute period, which Tamar Bachaliashvili spent in the house of her relative – Rita Zurabashvili, after she left her home on July 18?
In accordance with the case files and video-recordings, after leaving home, Tamar Bachaliashvili went to the house of her relative, which she left 10 minutes later and then travelled to Marneuli.
In the beginning, the investigation failed to examine this episode. Did Tamar Bachaliashvili enter the flat or did she meet anybody there? The investigation never raised these questions and nobody questioned the neighbors in that house.
The Prosecutor's office is deliberately trying to create a public opinion that Tamar Bachaliashvili committed suicide.
As soon as Tamar Bachaliashvili's body was found, before the forensic findings were ready and the main investigative actions were carried out in the case, the Prosecutor's Office had already stated that Tamar Bachaliashvili had committed suicide.
A number of questions arose before the investigative body expressing the doubts on a biased investigation of the case on the part of the authorities. Instead of answering these questions during the investigation, the Prosecutor's Office released the personal information of Tamar Bachaliashvili and her family to convince the public about the version of suicide: They disclosed the fact that Tamar Bachaliashvili visited a psychologist, that in 2012-2013 a restraining order was issued against Tamar Bachaliashvili's father and investigation was launched into the fact of domestic violence (against his wife), as well as the fact that Tamar Bachaliashvili had previously attempted to commit a suicide.
Moreover, at the closed meeting, the prosecutor's office showed the journalists the personal video diaries of Tamar Bachaliashvili, which were taken by Tamar Bachaliashvili and uploaded on her personal Youtube starting from 2017 and ending in February 2020.
It should be noted that Tamar Bachaliashvili had deleted these videos and the prosecutor's office restored these videos. Some journalists published the information from Tamar Bachaliashvili's conversations of these personal videos. The prosecutor's office focused only on some few moments from the videos, where Bachaliashvili mentions suicide. While most of the part, where Bachaliashvili speaks optimistically, is somehow made of no interest for the investigation.
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