According to the Armenian police, they detonated a hand grenade while trying to break into the police headquarters of the city’s northern Nor Nork district. Two of them were injured by the blast and hospitalized while the other remained outside the building, threatening to set off another grenade, the police spokesman, Narek Sargsian, told reporters.
Sargsian said that the man was “neutralized” by security forces “without the use of firearms” following a two-hour standoff. An anti-terror squad of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) was seen arriving at the scene during the standoff.
Another law-enforcement body, the Investigative Committee, said later in the day that it has launched a criminal inquiry into “terrorism.” Neither the committee nor the police said anything about the attackers’ motives.
Earlier on Sunday, the police rounded up and detained 49 members of a group, called Combat Brotherhood, who were about to visit one of the border areas in northern Tavush province which Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian plans to hand over to Azerbaijan amid an uproar from his political foes, other critics and local residents. All of them were reportedly set free hours later. Combat Brotherhood, which is also strongly opposed to the territorial concession, was quick to deny any connection with the Nor Nork police incident.
The Yerevan daily Hraparak reported, meanwhile, that all three attackers are supporters of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a pro-Western and nationalist fringe group also critical of Pashinian. It quoted a senior NDA figure as saying that two of them are veterans of the 2020 war with Azerbaijan while the other lost a son during the six-week hostilities.
The NDA leaders have close ties to jailed members of an armed group that stormed another Armenian police station in 2016 to demand that then President Serzh Sarkisian step down. The three dozen gunmen, who took police officers and medical personnel hostage, laid down their weapons after a two-week standoff with security forces which left three police officers dead.