Guram Sharadze

Sharadze was involved in the anti-Soviet Georgian national movement in the late 1980s and was closely associated with Zviad Gamsakhurdia who became, in 1991, the first elected President of Georgia.

[1] In 2004, he was sentenced to fifteen days imprisonment for hooliganism, after he tore down posters of the Polish artist Rafal Olbinski at an exhibition at the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia, labeling them as "pornographic".

Next year, he was briefly arrested again for insulting the rector of Tbilisi State University who had launched a Western-modeled program of reforms.

On 20 May 2007, Guram Sharadze was assassinated on Melikishvili Avenue in central Tbilisi in front of the Aldagi Insurance Company office by Giorgi Barateli, an erstwhile friend of his son.

[4] Sharadze’s daughter has alleged that the killing was political and her father was murdered in order to silence a vocal and a long-time critic of the expected repatriation of Muslim Meskhetians, the group deported from Georgia in 1944 by Joseph Stalin.