Gyumri Mayor’s Indicted Son Arrested

Armenialiberty.org, Armenia - Jul 20, 2007

By Hovannes Shoghikian

A fugitive son of Gyumri Mayor Vartan Ghukasian was arrested on Friday nearly two months after being charged with instigating a high-profile shootout in Armenia’s second largest city.

Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General said Spartak Ghukasian surrendered to the police and was immediately taken to a prison in Artik, a small town near Gyumri.

Ghukasian reportedly led one of the two groups of young men who exchanged gunfire in broad daylight on May 20. The other group is thought to have been led by Rustam Sargsian, a son of a prominent local businessman and former government official. Sargsian and one of his associates remain on the run.

“Measures are being taken to track down two other individuals charged within the framework of this criminal case,” a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, Sona Truzian, told RFE/RL.

Ghukasian Jr. turned himself in the day after his controversial father was summoned to a meeting in Yerevan with Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian. A newspaper report on Friday said the Gyumri mayor, who has claimed to be unaware of his son’s whereabouts, was “offered” to hand over the suspect to law-enforcement authorities within 24 hours. He was reportedly received by President Robert Kocharian earlier this week.

In an earlier televised interview, Ghukasian vehemently denied Spartak’s involvement in the gunfight that left at least two people wounded. He accused the media and his rivals of discrediting his family by implicating it in other instances of violence reported in Gyumri in recent years. He also rejected mounting calls for his resignation.

The flamboyant mayor, who is a senior member of the governing Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), was seriously wounded in a mysterious drive-by shooting that killed three of his bodyguards about last April.

The shootout coincided with the May 20 disappearance of a 12-year-old boy whose decomposed body was found in an abandoned Gyumri shack a week ago. Many local residents suspect that Robert Simonian may have been hit by a stray bullet or run over by one of the cars involved in the shootout.

Investigators have effectively dismissed this theory, saying that Simonian most probably died as a result of playing with a hand grenade or another explosive device.

Residents of neighboring houses did not report hearing any explosions on May 20, however. Many also wonder how the police failed to stumble on Simonian’s corpse when they scoured the entire shanty town with sniffer dogs in the days that followed his disappearance.

The prosecutors have said the precise cause of the boy’s death will be established by a more meticulous forensic examination. According to Truzian, the examination is still not complete.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Escape or Torture?: Police under spotlight as death of witness raises questions

May 22, 2007
ArmeniaNow.com, Armenia
By Vahan Ishkhanyan
ArmeniaNow reporter

Human rights activists have joined the number of family members and media who want to see a thorough and independent investigation into the death last Saturday (May 12) of Levon Gulyan, who died in police custody, where he was summoned as a witness to a murder.
Police claim the 30 year old husband and father of two died after falling out a second-floor window while trying to escape from police questioning.

His family and agencies that include the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) are suspicious of the police account of events.

On Thursday Aaron Rhodes, chairman of IHF, sent a letter to the chief of Police Service, encouraging a full investigation, citing a “past record of suspicious cases of death in police custody in Armenia and the fact that torture and ill-treatment by the police remain serious problems”.

Gulyan’s family believe their loved-one was beaten to death by police.

Whatever the cause, his death is linked to May 9, when Stepan Vardanyan, was shot dead near a restaurant owned by Gulyan in the Shengavit district of Yerevan.

Vardanyan was the son of Gagik Vardanyan, who owns a sauna near Gulyan’s restaurant. He was killed about 10 p.m. in what might be gang-related violence, as two other killings have taken place between Vardanyan’s and another clan.

According to restaurant staff, shortly before the killing, Gulyan had asked rival clan members to leave the neighborhood, and had told his staff to stay inside. Gulyan witnessed the murder, but told police he could not identify the killer.

A few hours after the killing, police took Gulyan from his home at about 3 a.m. and held him until about 10:30 p.m., demanding that he return the next day (May 11).

Gulyan returned to police at 10 a.m. the next day (May 11) and was held for 24 hours until he was released, so that he could go to vote in the parliamentary election. He was told to return in two hours.

Gulyan returned as appointed. By 6 p.m. his body was in a city morgue.

In the time after his release for questioning, Gulyan told his family that he had been repeatedly beaten while investigators demanded that he name the killer. According to relatives, Gulyan told police he wanted an attorney present. He claimed he was told by police that if he brought a lawyer, the lawyer would also be beaten. Family members, including an uncle, Hovik Papazyan, say Gulyan told them he had been beaten by Hovik Soghomonyan, deputy head of the Shengavit police department.

The family says that on the day of his death, Gulyan was picked up by Hovik Tamamyan, deputy head of criminal division in the deputy’s own car to be taken to the police department. Sayat Shirinyan, head of the police information and public relations department says Tamamyan is not connected with the case.

Tamamyan has a reputation for cruelty. Two murders are connected with his name. He gained renown in 2004 as the head of the Kentron police department, who harshly squared accounts with the participants of the April rallies, particularly as he allegedly ordered the beating of Mher Ghalachyan, a journalist of the Chorrord Ishkanutyun newspaper. There is information that Tamamyan is a friend of the Vardanyan family and wanted to immediately find the killer.

A statement by the police said: “Gulyan asked one of the department representatives for some water in one of the offices and, taking advantage of the officer’s absence, made an attempt to escape through the window, but, slipping, fell down from the first floor and died immediately of injuries received in the fall.”

Jemma Gulyan was among those protesting her husband’s death

The Gulyans maintain that he was beaten to death and was then thrown from the window.

“Why should my brother try to escape, when he twice went to the police on his own. He wouldn’t go, if he were going to run away,” says he sister Armine.

May 15th Larisa Alaverdyan, the first ombudswoman of Armenia, and director of the non-governmental organization Against Violation of Law, told a press conference summoned on the occasion of Levon Gulyan’s death that the Republic of Armenia Police must take responsibility for Gulyan’s death.

Even if the police explanation that Gulyan slipped while trying to escape were true, what conditions exist to make a cooperative witness try to escape from police questioning?

“This is a harshest violation of the basic right for life. A healthy man enters a state structure, but relatives get back his corpse,” Alaverdyan said.

Another sister, Lilit, said the family will not bury Gulyan until an autopsy has been performed by an outside authority.

Upon the request of the family, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has invited specialists from Denmark and Germany to do a forensic investigation.

The preliminary forensic medical examination states Gulyan’s death was the result of fatal injuries that included fractures of the skull, thorax, spine and ribs.

(The family hired three attorneys, but on May 15, all three withdrew from the case for unknown reasons.)

Police showed journalists the scene of Gulyan’s death, saying that he had fallen while trying to jump to grab a pipe some two meters from the window.

It could be argued, however, that someone attempting to flee through the window could more simply escape by jumping directly to the tin roof of the basement under the window. It also appears that someone who would have fallen reaching for the pipe, would have landed on the roof, rather than the asphalt. However, no marks appeared on the roof indicating such a fall.

The Gulyan family was accepted by deputy heads of the police Ararat Mahtesyan and Armen Yeritsyan, who promised to hold an unbiased investigation and to reveal all its findings.

However, both press and rights activists are skeptical about the possibility the guilty is found. As a rule murders committed inside the police are not disclosed. In the rare cases available, police officers are tried for alleged abuse of power and not murders.

A year ago ArmeniaNow published an article on the case of Armen Ghambaryan, who suffered a ruptured spleen while in police custody (see Accused Accusers).Neither Ghambaryan’s nor his lawyer’s protests to find the person responsible came to any result, while Ghambaryan, despite his bad health, is still in the isolation cell.

A press conference has been scheduled for 6 p.m. Saturday, during which preliminary findings of forensic specialists from Denmark and Germany will be released.

A site has been launched in connection with Gulyan’s case www.levon-gulyan.info .

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Armenian Police Accused Of Deadly Torture

Monday 14, May 2007
Armenialiberty
By Ruzanna Stepanian

Relatives of a young man who died in police custody at the weekend appealed to Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian on Monday to thwart what they see as attempts by the Armenian police to cover up the extraordinary case of brutal torture.

Levon Ghulian died in mysterious circumstances on Saturday while being questioned by the police as a presumed witness of a deadly gunfight in Yerevan reported earlier last week. The police claim that during the interrogation the 30-year-old father of two tried to escape through a window but slipped and fell to the ground from the second floor of a police building in Yerevan.

Ghulian’s close relatives strongly deny this version of events, saying that he was tortured to death by police interrogators. State prosecutors have launched a criminal inquiry into the incident which has cast a fresh spotlight on the problem of police brutality in Armenia. Local and international watchdogs say the practice is widespread.

“They probably hit him in the head with something and he died,” Ghulian’s uncle, Toros Papazian, told RFE/RL. “They just don’t want to admit that he died in a police office.”

Papazian said his nephew’s body bore traces of violence such as a broken rib and thigh bone and bruises on his heels. “Levon was accidentally tortured to death before being thrown out of the window,” he said.

Ghulian was the owner of a restaurant in Yerevan’s southern Shengavit district near which a man was shot dead on May 9 in a reported dispute between two groups of unknown individuals. He was first detained and questioned at Shengavit’s police department.

“They were forcing Levon to name the murderer,” Papazian said. “He didn’t know that, but they kept beating him.”

Papazian added that Ghulian was for days repeatedly interrogated by the Shengavit police and prosecutors before being taken to the national Police Service’s Directorate General of Criminal Investigations on Saturday. He said the deputy chief of the department, Hovik Tamamian, personally drove him to his office.

In a joint letter, members of the dead man’s extended family asked Sarkisian to interfere in the inquiry. “The prime minister was saying during the election campaign that all the guilty must be punished and that Armenia must become a law-abiding country,” explained Papazian.

“I’ve heard that my brother wasn’t the first victim [of police torture] and that there have been such cases before,” Ghulian’s grieving sister Marine told RFE/RL. “I don’t know what the relatives [of other victims] did. I am appealing to them to join us in fighting against such injustice.”

“Let my brother be the last victim,” she added.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.