MediaOlga - Comment to The Official Version

Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania, who helped lead the revolution that toppled the corruption-tainted regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, was killed early Thursday by an apparent natural gas leak, the Georgian interior minister said.
Zhvania, 41, was at a friend's apartment when the leak occurred, Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said in a live broadcast on Rustavi-2 television.

"It is an accident," Merabishvili said. "We can say that poisoning by gas took place."

Security guards broke through a window early Thursday when they heard no signs of life inside several hours after the prime minister arrived, Merabishvili said. Zhvania had entered the apartment at about midnight and the guards broke in between 4 a.m. and 4:30 a.m.
His host, Raul Usupov, deputy governor of Georgia's Kvemo-Kartli region, also died.
An Iranian-made gas-powered heating stove was in the main room of the mezzanine-floor apartment, where a table was set up with a backgammon set lying open. Zhvania was in a chair; Usupov's body was found in the kitchen.

"It all happened suddenly," Vano Merabishvili said.

A longtime politician, Zhvania was part of the opposition to former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and played a prominent role in protests that led to Shevardnadze's ouster after allegedly fraudulent elections in November 2003.
President Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the protests, named Zhvania prime minister following his landslide election in January 2004. Zhvania was considered a moderate to counterbalance to the more impetuous president, and he was one of the key government figures trying to negotiate settlements with Georgia's separatist regions.
Like Saakashvili, Zhvania was a one-time ally of Shevardnadze. After breaking with Shevardnadze, however, Zhvania followed a more conciliatory path than Saakashvili, and he was considered a more moderate politician who sought consensus rather than conflict.
In Shevardnadze's circles, it is Zurab who's considered the most dangerous opponent. He's a lot smarter than Saakashvili. His organizational skills are much stronger. Knowing his own minuses (a lack of charisma, Armenian origin and, finally, the rumors of his sexual orientation), Zhvania has stepped into the background, having made Nino Burjanadze the formal leader of his bloc. But no one has any doubts: if Nino becomes president, the real power will be in Zurab's hands. And this is exactly what Shevardnadze's people want to avoid.

The death of the Georgian premier, Mr. Zhvania, is mysterious, though it was foreseeable to some extent. To be a premier in Georgia is not safe. The problem is with the lack of transparency in the intentions of Georgian leaders.

The Georgian prosecutor's office has taken a strange step recently: journalists representing Georgia's leading media were invited to watch a tape from the scene of the accident. The aim of the screening was to convince the media that the victims had not been in the same room: Raul Yusupov was in the kitchen, Zurab Zhvania in the living room.

The journalists, however, were not convinced: first, no one was provided with a copy of the tape, and moreover, it was not allowed to videotape or photograph anything from the TV screen; second, it became obvious that the investigators and the bodyguards described the location of the bodies differently.

But it is highly improbable that two adult men could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning simultaneously while being in two different rooms. And this means that the authorities are trying to conceal the fact that, at the moment of death, Zurab Zhvania and Raul Yusupov were together. This explains the indecisiveness of the bodyguards and the seeming hurriedness of the investigation.

Maya Nikoleishvili, an independent forensic expert, said this in a Gazeta.ru interview (she was also quoted in Kanavin's RTR story):

- They showed footage from the scene of the accident and said: you've seen it and that's enough. The journalists were surprised and said that they couldn't even make sure whether the tape was authentic or edited. It's not supposed to be done this way and we haven't had anything like this in the past few years. We haven't seen the face of the dead Zurab Zhvania. Only those who have been in the apartment saw the body.

I'm not saying that I doubt it was an accident, but we demand the proof that it actually was an accident. With the privatization, where we're talking about hundreds of millions - maybe it had something to do with Zhvania's death? And then there was a terrorist act, which happened in Gori a day before Zhvania's death [...]. If there was a connection and Zhvania's death wasn't an accident, then it appears to be aimed against President Saakashvili.

- What's the point of concealing it?

– We aspire to be a country in which such medieval killings do not take place.

- Do you find anything suspicious about the accident hypothesis? Is it true that many people in Tbilisi die because of malfunctioning heaters?

- I wouldn't say that it happens often, but it does happen. The heaters do cause lethal cases, of course. But here the situation is slightly different. These people were in secret rented apartment.

Usually, Zhvania did not walk around on his own, without bodyguards, who were supposed to check everything. Bodyguards can't leave a person to die just like this, even if it's an accident.

They were showing the neighbors on TV and they said that they were returning home from 1:30 to 3:30 am, and there was not a single car in the street at that time. Where were the bodyguards, and was it an accident [that they weren't there]? Lots of suspicious details. I'm not saying that there wasn't an accident - I'm saying, please, convince us that this is how it was.
Raul Yusupov's father, Yashar Yusupov, told a Georgian TV station that his son "hadn't died in the apartment where they discovered him" (via Gazeta.ru):

"I want to know the truth and find peace, because my son did not die in that apartment," he said in an interview with the Georgian Mze TV company.

According to Mze, Raul Yusupov had never lived on Saburtalinskaya Street, where the tragedy took place, and he had never rented an apartment there. For the past five years, the deputy governor had been living in Tbilisi's Varketilsky Microdistrict with his wife.

© Olga Sikharulidze, 2006.