Georgian authorities have said they are investigating footage claiming to show neo-Nazis beating up ‘anti-fascists’ in Tbilisi.

Three videos of such attacks were posted to the Facebook page ‘The Sacred War’ over the past three months.

The latest footage, published on 18 February, shows several people kicking a man in the head as he lays defenceless on the ground. The video is captioned: ‘Young National Socialist skinheads hunted down an antifascist and beat him hard’.

Another 3-minute clip captioned, ‘skinheads from Georgia hunted down an anti-fascist with whom they had a conversation about their views’, was published on the page on 11 February.  It shows a group of men asking another man if he knows the difference between a nazi and a fascist, before the group attack and beat him.

On Monday, the video disappeared from Facebook.

A third, 6-second video dated 12 November 2021, shows a man being beaten and insulted by up to five people, and appears to have been shot in Dedaena Park in Tbilisi.

It is captioned: ‘an anti-fascist who was a suspect in stabbing of a 13-year old teenager and let free by the ACAB [police] in a day without a fair prosecution has been spotted in the streets, he had an instant taste of direct justice and was mowed down in a matter of seconds.’

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs declined to give details of their investigation, saying that ‘at this point, we can only say that an investigation has been launched’.

The Facebook page on which the videos were posted, ‘The Sacred War’ was created in December 2020. It includes several hundred photos and videos from around the world, though primarily from Europe, claiming to show neo-Nazis attacking what they term ‘anti-fascists’.

It is not clear who runs the page, though many of the interactions with the page appear to be from the accounts of Georgians.

The page invites users to submit footage of similar attacks which they say they will then publish.

In addition to the footage of attacks on individuals in Georgia, there are several other posts dedicated to the country.

The first such post was published on 15 August 2021 and was related to an attack by homophobic extremists on the offices of Tbilisi Pride the previous month.

A Facebook spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

[Read on OC Media: Georgia's ongoing epidemic of homophobic street violence]