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The family of Badri Patarkatsishvili said Friday that his
body will be buried at home, once the investigation will be over and the report
with the cause of death will be made.
Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian opposition leader and
wealthy businessman, died Tuesday night of heart failure at his home
outside Leatherhead, a suburban commuter town southwest of London.
He was 52. The initial post mortem tests released by British police on
Thursday said that Patarkatsishvili died on natural causes.
Even though he frequently mentioned that there were plots to
assassinate him, the British investigators said that there isn’t any reason to
believe he was killed. The toxicology tests that investigators will run to
determine the cause of his death will take almost ten weeks.
Patarkatsishvili’s body can’t be released until the
investigations and tests are over.
His family made their first statement since his death
saying: "We have lost our son,
father, husband, and our most beloved person. We completely trust the
professionalism of the British police and criminal experts. As soon as the
final forensic report is released on the causes of his death, we will transfer
Badri's body to Georgia
and commit it to his native land," Reuters reports.
He was accused of plotting to oust the ex-Soviet republic's
government.
Patarkatsishvili was considered the force behind the
November anti-government protests in Georgia.
He was being investigated at home for plotting to oust the
government. These accusations were denied by Patarkatsishvili, but the fact
that he offered sums of money to police to side with protesters he admitted.
The protests were stopped by police in a brutal way.
He ran against Mikhail Saakashvili in the elections in
January, gathering only 7 percent of the vote.
His doctor told his family that it didn’t show any sign of
heart disease at the latest medical tests.
He was the richest man in Georgia
and built his success after he partnered with Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky
in the 1990s, a Kremlin critic who also lives in London in exile.
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