Justice Minister Gia Kavtaradze, who came under fire by the opposition parties and some human rights groups for a failure to prevent bloody prison riot on March 27, said although the Ministry had information about a planned riot “we had no information about the exact date when it was scheduled to happen.”

“We received this information on March 25 and we were preparing to undertake [preventive] measures by transferring [organizers] to other detention centers, but they started [the riot] overnight on March 26-27; they outpaced us,” Gia Kavtaradze told Rustavi 2 television late on March 27.