Armenia’s Investigative Committee charged them with fraud and forgery. It said that the Stepanakert mayor, Davit Sargsian, brought four vehicles belonging to the municipal administration to Armenia during last September’s mass exodus of Karabakh’s population and then illegally registered them in the name of his friends and relatives.
The mayor of the northern Karabakh town of Martakert, Misha Gyurjian, was charged with misappropriating one such car after fleeing the region’s together with over 100,000 other Karabakh Armenians. Yerevan courts remanded Gyurjian and Sargsian in custody on Sunday and Monday respectively.
Another Yerevan-based Karabakh mayor, Hayk Shamirian, avoided pre-trial detention despite being charged with the same crimes last Thursday. Shamirian, who ran the eastern Karabakh town of Askeran, was moved to house arrest on Friday.
All three men deny the accusations. Artak Beglarian, a former Karabakh premier, also dismissed them as baseless.
“I am sure that these cases are politically motivated,” Beglarian said, accusing Pashinian’s government of trying to “intimidate and punish” Karabakh Armenians supporting the protest leader, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian.
Sargsian, Gyurjian and Shamirian were among exiled leaders and ordinary refugees from Karabakh who met with Galstanian on May 21. The meeting was part of Galstanian’s consultations with various groups and individuals aimed at ramping up momentum for his opposition-backed bid to oust Pashinian.
Pashinian’s political team seems concerned about Karabakh Armenians’ participation in the protests triggered by the Armenian premier’s decision to hand over several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. Some of its surrogates have openly warned the refugees to stay away from the protests that resumed on Sunday.
Beglarian insisted that the Armenian traffic police themselves told the three mayors early this year that they should change, with their local councils’ permission, ownership of their respective municipal cars in order to have them registered in Armenia.
“The police themselves directed and advised them to find such a solution and then accepted it and registered [the vehicles,]” Beglarian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “If there was such a problem they should not have registered in the first place.”
Beglarian also argued that the Armenian authorities have no jurisdiction over Karabakh and cannot prosecute anyone in connection with crimes allegedly committed there.
“It’s not about Artsakh,” countered Gor Abrahamian, the Investigative Committee spokesman. “It’s about criminal offenses committed by concrete people living in Armenia.”
Pashinian publicly threatened to crack down on Samvel Shahramanian, the Karabakh president now based in Yerevan, after the latter declared in March that the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic continues to exist despite the Azerbaijani control over the region. Shahramanian did not take part in the meeting with Galstanian.