TBILISI. May 6 (Interfax-AVN) - Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's plan "to discredit the opposition by staging a military coup has failed," said Irakly Batiashvili, a former Georgian state security minister and now an opposition leader.
"Everything was designed to link the presumed military coup to the opposition's protests with the demand of Saakashvili's resignation so as to demoralize the opposition, but this has led to the opposite results, as everybody perfectly understood the dirty methods used by the authorities, and society will surely consolidate with the opposition," Batiashvili said on the Maestro TV channel on Tuesday evening.
"Georgian society has been insulted by the Saakashvili regime's provocations," he said.
Batiashvili was arrested in 2006 on charges of providing "moral support" to the military coup in the Kodori Gorge of Abkhazia. The charges were based on a secertly recorded telephone conversation between Batiashvili and coup leader Emzar Kvitsiani, a presidential envoy to the Kodori Gorge, in which Batiashvili asked the mutineers to hold on and warned them against shedding blood. He spent over two years in prison.