An activist of businessman Gagik Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) has been arrested on charges of assaulting police officers on the eve of Sunday’s municipal elections in Yerevan.
A BHK campaign office in the city’s Ajapnyak district was searched by Armenia’s police and Investigative Committee on Saturday on Saturday on suspicion of handing out vote bribes. The raid provoked an angry reaction from local party activists who argued with law-enforcement officers at the scene. The office coordinator, Grigor Grigorian, was arrested on Tuesday.
The Investigative Committee said on Thursday that Grigorian, who is also the deputy chief of the district administration, has been formally charged with assault. In a statement, the law-enforcement body claimed that he told dozens of BHK supporters to break into the campaign office, smash its furniture and thus disrupt the search. He and other persons “used violence” against some of the policemen, according to the statement.
Gevorg Petrosian, a BHK parliamentarian who witnessed the incident, strongly denied the accusations. “There could have been no violence against the policemen because they were numerous and there was no intention to attack them,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian service. “There was only commotion.”
Tsarukian’s party, which has the second largest group in the Armenian parliament, did not officially react to the arrest as of Thursday evening . Its senior top representatives condemned the Ajapnyak raid over the weekend. Naira Zohrabian, the BHK candidate for Yerevan mayor, labelled it as “counterpropaganda” against her party.
Speaking to journalists on Sunday, Zohrabian accused law-enforcement authorities of systematically harassing her supporters during the two-week election campaign. She said that the police detained 300 BHK activists on suspicion of vote but failed to find any evidence of the illegal practice.
According to the official election results, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s My Step bloc won 81 percent of the vote, compared with just 7 percent polled by the BHK. Tsarukian on Monday recognized those results and congratulated My Step on its landslide victory.
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