Vice PM Mdinaradze: Espionage arrests should serve as warning that no foreign undercover agent can ever feel safe operating in our country

“This should serve as a sign, or, if you will, a warning, free from any explicit threat, to ensure that, once and for all, no undercover agent from another nation can ever feel safe in our country, at the very least,” stated Vice Prime Minister and State Minister for Law Enforcement Coordination, Mamuka Mdinaradze, in response to a journalist’s question regarding the individuals arrested on espionage charges.

According to Mamuka Mdinaradze, the Georgian state has never been as strong as it is today in this particular field.

“I promise everyone that no such individual will ever slip under our radar again. The Georgian state has never been this strong in this particular field, and I say this based on the capability of Geka Geladze’s agency, Sulkhan Tamazashvili’s agency, and so forth. When I say that no one in this country had ever arrested a real spy until recently, look at who the United National Movement used to lock up for spying. They framed a photographer once, and another time, people who had insulted Misha Saakashvili on live television. Then they seized newspapers from them, claiming they were collecting them for the Russians, as if the Russians couldn’t buy newspapers themselves. That was the absurd level of those so-called spies.

Never before in Georgia’s history have we arrested someone who actually runs a network, distributes money and assignments, demands answers, and calls for reports. Nor have we ever detained anyone accused of spying for two countries at once until now. We only started working on this a matter of months ago. There had been some groundwork on identifying them to a degree, but collecting concrete evidence to follow through and arrest real spies is something no one in Georgia had either dared or managed to do until now. We have achieved this, and I am personally proud of it,” Mamuka Mdinaradze noted.