Tigran Arakelian, a former political activist, was charged with blackmailing state officials to extort money from them and moved to house arrest a few days later. In a video message posted on social media on June 22, Arakelian claimed that Kyaramian and the chief of the Investigative Committee’s Yerevan division, Azat Gevorgian, beat him up in the latter’s office.
“They poured water on me and started burning various parts of my body with an electric shock gun,” he claimed.
Kyaramian dismissed through a spokesman the “baseless” allegations before prosecutors ordered another law-enforcement agency, the National Security Service (NSS), to investigate them.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday that nobody has been charged in that probe yet. It did not comment further.
The NSS has interrogated Arakelian as a “victim.” But it has declined to clarify whether Kyaramian or Gevorgian were also questioned.
Kyaramian, 32, is widely regarded as one of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s trusted lieutenants, having held five high-level positions in the Armenian security apparatus and government since 2018.
In further Facebook broadcasts, Arakelian alleged that Kyaramian tried to force him to testify that NSS Director Armen Abazian and Prosecutor-General Anna Vardapetian gave him discrediting information about senior government officials which he then passed on to an Armenian video blogger based in the United States.
The blogger, Vartan Ghukasian, is a former police officer nicknamed Dog. He has attracted a large audience in recent years with his hard-hitting and opinionated comments on events taking place in Armenia. Ghukasian is notorious for routinely using profanities to attack both Armenia’s current leaders and their political foes in videos posted on YouTube.
The Investigative Committee charged Ghukasian with extortion, calls for violence and contempt of court before a Yerevan court issued in May an international arrest warrant for him. The ex-policeman denies the accusations.
A group of Ghukasian’s friends and like-minded individuals in Armenia are facing the same charges. At least one of them is held in detention.
Arakelian used to be a well-known member of former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress (HAK) party. He was already arrested in 2015 and subsequently convicted of blackmailing two Armenian parliamentarians.
