One of those suspects, Tigran Arakelian, publicly accused Argishti Kyaramian, who runs the Investigative Committee, and the chief of the committee’s Yerevan division, Azat Gevorgian, of beating him up in the latter’s office during his initial, brief detention in June.
Kyaramian dismissed the“baseless” allegations before prosecutors ordered the NSS to investigate them. His investigators brought more charges against Arakelian and arrested him in July. It emerged around the same time the three other suspects also claimed to have been ill-treated by Kyaramian in custody.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General said on Friday that the four-month NSS probe is still not over. It did not explain why the security service is taking so long to assess the veracity of the torture allegations.
Zhanna Aleksanian, a human rights activist, believes that the NSS and the prosecutors were never serious about finding out the truth.
“The NSS knows all too well that it needs the green light [from Armenia’s political leadership] to open a case against Kyaramian,” Aleksanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “There is just no way they could state that he tortured those people.”
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.
All four arrested men are accused of blackmailing state officials and other individuals on orders issued by Vartan Ghukasian, a controversial video blogger thought to be based in the United States. 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 blogger nicknamed Dog denies the accusations.