Mzia Kutivadze

• All this happened in this way, wife and husband, Tina – my sister and her husband, Gega Kbakhidze. • How old were they then? • Tina was 18, as for Gega, he was probably 25, I don’t remember well. So they devised a plan about how to hijack plane and then land in Turkey. From Turkey they planned to fly somewhere farther. They used wedding just to camouflage the real purpose and leave the country without extra checking. As for wedding itself was real, they really got married but they used it as a good occasion. They considered that in this way all of them (brides-man and all their friends who were in wedding party) would have no problem to leave the border. So, among them were: Tina, Gega, brothers Iverielebi, Tabidze George, Soso, David Mikaberidze and the priest Chikhladze. I want to admit the fact that the priest wasn’t there at all, but …. By the way I knew only Gega from all these people and Soso just from distance. All this terrible fact happened with the help of one young girl, who worked there. They made friends with her and then due to her naivety, she passed them without checking. Then everything what happened in the plane I knew from the retellings of my sister, from other relatives or itself from eyewitnesses. As for newspapers and TV-s, everyone knows how and what was written and transmitted. It somehow helped to form public opinion. If we look back nowadays, we can consider this terrible fact as great mistake. All these youngsters were gifted and interesting people, who wanted to show their protest in this way and thus leave the country. But our family never approved this step and it seems to us that people a little bit idealized everything around this fact.

• How many of them were sentenced to death? • All of them were sentenced to death besides Tina. Chikhladze, brothers Iveriels and Gega were sentenced to death, as for David Mikadze committed suicide in the plane and Tabidze was perished during shooting in the plane. • How much was sentenced to Tina? • Tina was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment. • How long did she spend in prison? • She was in prison for 6 years. Then she was taken to colony. Everyone treated her with tolerance taking into consideration her condition. She herself is calm, quiet person and she was given solitary cell. As they knew that she was painting and she was given a box of paints, just to make her busy and thus to help her to balance her emotional situation. Tamar, her mother, did her best, even quarreled and had hysterics in colony just to make sure that good specialists would cure Tina if she had even toothache, because as we know they had terrible doctors in colony. Everyone knew that there mustn’t be any kind of problems for Tina in prison. Then it happened so that during this period national-liberation movement began to activate and 9th of April , 1989 took place. People came out with slogans and demanded to liberate Tina. Then Vazha Lortkipanidze, my husband’s class-mate and the head of the department of ideology in “CK” (Central Committee), called us and directed to school N 55. The wife of one of the killed boys in plane worked at this school and he advised us to ask her if she wouldn’t be against the liberation of Tina. But when she learned who I was, she got very angry and I left the room without asking anything. I was very sorry for her.