“Was It Strategy or…”: Kikia Says the ‘Agasi’ File Has Exploded Into a State Scandal

Analyst Mentor Kikia said on the RTSH1 program “3D” that the recent case cannot be treated as an isolated episode or a salacious sideshow, but as evidence of state mechanisms being placed at the service of crime figures.

According to Kikia, efforts to shift attention toward peripheral details undermine the real issue.

“This is not a sex scandal. This is a state scandal that shows how institutions have been placed at the service of crime,” he said, noting that senior officials’ collision with the law reveals the degradation of several parallel structures.

“These two alone are alarming enough to understand not just the collapse of one institution, but the collapse of a chain of important state institutions. We must understand one thing to be serious in analyzing the situation. This is not an isolated case of an agency official, driven by a fling with an individual, seeking to satisfy curiosity.

If it were only that, we would still raise our voices because it is scandalous, but this is entirely peripheral. How did we get here? The AKSH scandal was uncovered, which was officially charged by SPAK as a criminal organization, with Ergys Agasi among the men at the top of this organization, together with the director, together with a few others. The whole story comes down to blackmail, corruption, tenders, taking money – it comes down to cash, to corruption,” Kikia stressed.

According to Kikia’s analysis, the circumstances uncovered during the searches and seizures documented a broad network of influence, in which institution leaders and senior officials officially or privately frequented the workplaces of people now under accusation.

“Ergys Agasi could not be arrested after security measures were imposed on the others. We don’t know whether it was an inability to arrest him or a strategy to leave him out to pasture to see where he would graze in the meantime. But by that time information had been gathered.

Let’s not forget that when he was arrested, when the measure for Ergys Agasi was issued and the office was searched – the famous story of the wine – some photos emerged showing how x director and x minister and x official visited Agasi’s office, and the public’s amazement was: what institution does this gentleman run that the leaders of the state institutions, of that state we know publicly, visit this one’s office – and the de facto arrest of Agasi, when the phone was taken, when the car was seized, revealed other stories,” Kikia said.

The analyst listed some of the most critical points of this scandal, which directly touch national security.

“So we are dealing with a much bigger problem than one individual. Let’s not forget that he was arrested at a time when his car had the former number two of the State Police as driver and bodyguard, while he was wanted, and the former general director of the police has been removed from office, dismissed from duty. In theory, for not managing the protests well, but in practice for this matter. He was a man in this one’s service.

Now the question is: what information do the head of the secret service, the State Police transfer – what service does the forensic science lab that administers crime evidence provide, and the lab’s importance in the investigative chain is extraordinary? Does it analyze the DNA a person might leave on this bottle cap to determine whether or not they were at the scene? Does it analyze the DNA in a strand of hair found in the car where a man was killed, to show whether or not he is the perpetrator, or a drop of blood on clothes – and one yes or no from the expert raises or destroys the charges,” Kikia emphasized further.