02 March 2010, 23:00
Tsotne Gamsakhurdia stops hunger strike after meeting Patriarch
Lawyer Keti Bekauri told journalists that her client Tsotne, son of the first president of Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who is in custody, stopped his hunger strike in response to appeal of Elias the Second, Catholicos-Patriarch of all Georgia.
The "Georgia Today" writes that Catholicos Elias personally visited Tsotne in prison. Members of his family and lawyers assert that Tsotne was at death's door, when Patriarch Elias managed to persuade him to stop his "fatal hunger strike." However, in the end of February doctors asserted that Tsotne's condition was "stable".
Earlier, Tsotne's mother, Zviad's widow - Manana Archvadze-Gamsakhurdia, threatened the authorities that if they did not release her son, she would dig out Zviad's tomb in the Mtatsminda Pantheon, not far from Father David's Laura, and rebury the remnants of the first president of the country in the yard of his family house. Manana went to the Pantheon, together with a hundred of her supporters, and started opening the tomb; however, she was stopped by churchmen.
Nevertheless, if the verdict to Tsotne is unfavourable for the Gamsakhurdia family, the followers of the first president of Georgia and members of his family threaten to hold new protest actions, as the Radio Liberty reports.
