Former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who has been jailed since 2021, said today that his life is at risk and that excessive weight loss could cause multiple organ failure.
The information was advanced by British television Sky News, which cites a message from the former Georgian president transmitted by the lawyer.
Mikhail Saakashvili, who ruled the former Soviet republic of the Caucasus from 2004 to 2013, is serving a six-year sentence for corruption and abuse of power, and faces other criminal charges on a range of charges, including illegal entry into the country.
Charismatic and pro-Western leader, Saakashvili told Sky News who weighs 64 kilos, half his weight, is bedridden, has “bones disintegrating and unbearable pain”. At stake, he says, is an alleged poisoning he suffered in prison, says the British channel.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky holds images of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili taken in prison. The images were shown on February 1, 2023 at a press conference. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
In the message transmitted to Sky News, Mikhail Saakashvili took the opportunity to comment on the recent protests in Georgia, saying that Georgians must be prepared to “mobilize quickly, because the regime of the oligarchs is vindictive”.
Georgia has been rocked by protests against a bill that critics say is based on a 2012 Russian law that the Kremlin uses to crack down on its critics.
Saakashvili was in power during the war that broke out in the summer of 2008, when Russian troops invaded part of Georgia, and which ended in a quick Georgian defeat.
After serving two terms, Saakashvili had to leave the country when his pro-Russian opponents came to power in 2013.
Deprived of Georgian citizenship, he continued his political career in Ukraine, the country that gave him nationality, where he was governor of the Odessa region in 2015 and 2016.
After eight years in exile, he was arrested on his return to Georgia in October 2021, to serve the six-year prison sentence he had been sentenced to in absentia in 2018.
Saakashvili considers it to be a political process.
A court in Tbilisi in early February refused to release him on bail despite his deteriorating health.
One of the doctors who examined him at the request of his lawyers, toxicologist David Smith, claimed that the former president had been poisoned with heavy metals in prison, an accusation that Georgian authorities have refuted.
The non-governmental organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as the European Parliament, have already called for Saakashvili’s release.
