Ukrainian police recaptured the former Georgia president Mikheil Saakashvili late on Friday, prompting further protests in central Kyiv by his supporters who freed him from police custody earlier this week.
The development is the latest twist in a long feud between Ukrainian authorities and Saakashvili, who has turned on his one-time patron President Petro Poroshenko, accusing him of corruption and calling for his removal from office.
General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said that the opposition leader had been detained by police and was in a temporary detention facility.
“As promised, security officers did everything to avoid extreme violence and bloodshed,” he said in a post on Facebook.
The prosecutor has accused Saakashvili of supporting a criminal organisation, among other charges.
He is said to have received money from deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, who is currently living in exile in Russia, in order to organise a coup d’etat.
If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison.
Saakashvili has gone on hunger strike to protest his arrest, his lawyer and supporters said yesterday.
“Saakashvili has announced an indefinite hunger strike,” journalist and close ally Vladimir Fedorin wrote on Facebook, in comments echoed by the former leader’s lawyer Ruslan Chornolutskyi to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
The 49-year-old denounced the “false accusations” against him, Chornolutskyi added.
Saakashvili’s recapture follows a surreal game of hide-and-seek that saw him clamber on a roof to avoid law enforcement, before being broken out of a police van by protesters amid clashes with hundreds of riot police on Tuesday.
Ally and fellow Georgian, Davit Sakvarelidze, who was fired in March from his post as a senior prosecutor for Ukraine, called on Kyiv residents to take to the streets to protest Saakashvili’s recapture.
“Today Poroshenko broke all records and went down in history as a dictator who does this to political opponents,” he told channel NewsOne near the detention centre in central Kyiv.
Around 100 supporters of Saakashvili, the man who pulled Georgia out of Russia’s orbit in a 2003 revolution before becoming a governor in Ukraine, gathered outside a security service detention centre shouting “shame” on Friday following his arrest.
A court hearing on the case is expected be held in Kyiv tomorrow.
Prosecutors would ask for Saakashvili to be held under pretrial house arrest, spokeswoman for the prosecutor general Larysa Sargan said.
Since Saakashvili escaped detention on Tuesday, he has continued leading protests outside parliament, demanding Poroshenko’s impeachment over his failure to fight high-level corruption.
Saakashvili denies committing any crimes and says his actions were peaceful and legal.
Tuesday’s drama marked the latest chapter in the dizzying career of a man who spearheaded a pro-Western “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 and fought a disastrous war with Russia five years later that eventually prompted him to flee the Caucasus country.
Saakashvili returned to the spotlight as a vocal champion of the three-month street uprising in Kyiv that toppled a Moscow-backed government in 2014 and turned Ukraine on a pro-EU course.
Poroshenko rewarded Saakashvili for his efforts by appointing him governor of the important Black Sea region of Odessa in 2015.
However, an ugly falling out between the two men saw Saakashvili stripped of his Ukrainian passport – only for him to defy the authorities and force his way back into the conflict-riven country with the help of supporters in September.
The saga threatens to embarrass the pro-Western authorities at a time when they face a chorus of criticism from reformers and foreign donors over perceived backtracking on reforms and attacks on anti-corruption institutions.
On Friday Poroshenko said the case against Saakashvili was legitimate and that he should cooperate with investigators.
“If he flees from the investigation, this undermines his credibility,” he said.
After escaping police custody, Saakashvili called for a rally against Poroshenko in Kyiv to be held today, although he has kept a low profile in recent days after reportedly catching a cold while sleeping in makeshift protest camp outside parliament.
The politician’s latest detention followed a failed attempt by police to recapture him in a raid on the camp on Wednesday, which led to violent clashes with protesters.
While Saakashvili has a core base of supporters, he enjoys limited support across Ukraine.
Only 1.7% of voters would support his party, the Movement of New Forces, in elections, according to an October survey by the Kiev-based Razumkov Centre think-tank.
His backers see him as a fearless crusader against corruption but critics have said that there is little substance behind his rhetoric.