TBILISI, June 21. /TASS/. More than 300 protesters were detained by Georgia’s police near the parliamentary building in Tbilisi, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Bortsvadze said on Friday.
"Aggressively-minded protesters continued to commit offenses all through the night. At dawn, they destroyed police and civil cars and bashed private facilities located on the adjacent territory. As many as 305 protesters were detained for various offenses," he said, adding that the police had repeatedly asked the protesters to calm down but to no avail. Armed with batons, iron sticks, stones and blunt instruments, they tried to break into the parliament’s building and clashed with police.
He said the case was being investigated as "organization of group violence, steering it or participation in it."
Several thousand demonstrators gathered near the building of the national parliament in the center of Tbilisi on Thursday, demanding the resignation of the country’s interior chief and the parliament’s speaker. The protesters attempted to storm the building. The police dispersed the crowd, using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. According to official data, 240 people were injured in the clashes.
The mass protests were prompted by the participation of Russian lawmaker Sergei Gavrilov and other delegates from Russia at the 26th session of the General Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy in Tbilisi, which resulted in a scandal. On Thursday morning, Gavrilov as the president of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy opened its session in the building of the Georgian parliament.
The opposition Georgian legislators grew furious that Gavrilov addressed the delegates while sitting in the chair of the parliament’s speaker. In a sign of protest, the opposition’s representatives picketed the rostrum and the chair of the parliament’s speaker and did not allow the session to continue its work.
Later, a decision was made to wrap up the work of the General Assembly and for the Russian delegation to leave. Representatives of the ruling party "Georgian Dream - Democratic Georgia" said they did not know that Gavrilov would open the session and believe that the protocol was broken.