One of those suspects, Tigran Arakelian, publicly accused Kyaramian, who runs the Investigative Committee, and the chief of the committee’s Yerevan division, Azat Gevorgian, of beating him up during his initial, brief detention in June 2023.
“They told me that ‘you’re not going to see your wife and children anymore, a car will run over you, your home will be set on fire at night, something will happen to your loved ones because we are going to eliminate you together with your family,’” Arakelian claimed at the time.
“Argishti Kyaramian met me twice that day and during both meetings I was tortured, tortured by an electric shock gun,” he said. “They poured water on me and started burning various parts of my body with the electric shock gun.”
Kyaramian dismissed the “baseless” allegations before prosecutors ordered an inquiry into them. It emerged around the same time that the three other suspects also claimed to have been ill-treated by Kyaramian in custody.
The ACC closed the inquiry and cleared Kyaramian of any wrongdoing recently. Arakelian’s lawyer, Davit Avagian, challenged the “illegal” decision in court, accusing the ACC of a cover-up.
“I think that they obviously did not want to find out the real circumstances,” Avagian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday. This is why, he said, the ACC never explained why his client’s clothes were torn up and bore traces of blood after the June 2023 interrogation.
Kyaramian’s investigators brought more charges against Arakelian and arrested him again in July 2023. All four arrested men were accused of blackmailing state officials and other individuals on orders issued by Vartan Ghukasian, a controversial video blogger 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 2023 an international arrest warrant for him. The blogger nicknamed Dog denies the accusations.
Kyaramian again found himself in hot water later in 2023 after meeting with a group of relatives of Armenians who went missing during the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. The investigative publication Hetq.am reported that he manhandled one of the disgruntled relatives during the meeting.
Kyaramian, who is widely regarded as one of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s trusted lieutenants, came under fire from pro-government lawmakers last week after clashing with one of them during a parliamentary hearing in Yerevan. The 34-year-old lost his temper after the lawmaker, Hovik Aghazarian, accused the Investigative Committee of trying to bully citizens with unjustified arrests or threats of them. Aghazarian called for his resignation right after the incident.