The chief of the Armenian police, Valeri Osipian, on Wednesday spoke out against pardoning members of a radical group who stormed a police base in Yerevan and held him and several other officers hostage in 2016.
The three dozen gunmen demanded that then President Serzh Sarkisian free the jailed leader of their Founding Parliament movement, Zhirayr Sefilian, and step down. They laid down their weapons after a two-week standoff with security forces which left three police officers dead.
Shortly after Sarkisian resigned in April 2018 amid peaceful mass protests, all but two members of the group calling itself Sasna Tsrer were set free pending the outcome of their trials. The two defendants remaining behind bars stand accused of murdering Colonel Artur Vanoyan and Warrant Officers Gagik Mkrtchian and Yuri Tepanosian.
Last fall the new Armenian authorities declared a general amnesty applying to hundreds of convicts and criminal suspects, including the Sasna Tsrer members. A relevant law passed by the Armenian parliament made clear, however, that the latter can be pardoned only with the consent of their former hostages and other victims of the deadly attack.
Osipian made clear that he is not giving his consent to the amnesty for Sasna Tsrer as he testified at an ongoing trial of the group’s members. “I lost comrades,” he told the presiding judge. “Had I not lost comrades my position may have been different. I think that everyone must be subjected to a punishment defined by the law.”
“There was a crime and everyone involved in it must bear responsibility,” Osipian insisted when he spoke to reporters in the courtroom.
Osipian was a deputy chief of Yerevan’s police department when the police base located in the city’s southern Erebuni district was seized by Sasna Tsrer in July 2016. He went into the sprawling compound shortly after the pre-dawn attack. He and the other policemen taken hostage there were released a few days later.
In his court testimony, Osipian said that he was beaten up by several gunmen while being captured by them. He claimed that they also threatened to kill him if he refused to tell police forces to join Sasna Tsrer.
Together with Sefilian, the freed leaders and members of the armed formed last year a political party also called Sasna Tsrer. It was one of the 11 groups that ran in parliamentary elections held in Armenia on December 9. According to the official election results, Sasna Tsrer won only 1.8 percent of the vote and thus failed to win any seats in the new parliament.
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