The mayors of Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert and the towns of Martakert and Askeran were among refugees from Karabakh who met with the leader of those protests, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, on May 21. They were charged with fraud and embezzlement in the following days. They all denied the accusations.
Stepanakert’s Davit Sargsian and Martaker’s Misha Gyurjian were arrested pending investigation. They were held in prison and then under house arrest for the next couple of months.
Investigators said that Sargsian, Gyurjian and Askeran’s Hayk Shamirian illegally registered municipal vehicles in their or their relatives’ names after fleeing to Armenia together with over 100,000 other Karabakh Armenians in September 2023.
The mayors’ lawyers countered that the Armenian traffic police themselves had told them early this year to change, with their local councils’ permission, ownership of those cars in order to have them registered in Armenia. Gyurjian was accused of misappropriating one such car.
Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General insisted on Friday that it was “privatized illegally.” But it said the case against Gyurjian has been dropped because the Martakert mayor did not cause “substantial damage.”
“Our assertion that the Martakert mayor did not commit any criminal offense has finally been confirmed,” Gyurjian’s lawyer, Arsen Babayan, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “They didn’t manage to fabricate anything against him that could be sent to court.”
It is not yet clear whether the criminal cases against the two other mayors will also be closed. Babayan said they were opened to intimidate Karabakh Armenians and discourage them from participating in the Galstanian-led demonstrations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
In June, Pashinian publicly threatened to crack down on Karabakh’s exiled leadership, saying that it is encouraging the refugees to join the protests triggered by his decision to hand over several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. One week later, police broke into Karabakh’s permanent representation in Yerevan to impound a car used by Samvel Shahramanian, the exiled president.
Karabakh’s leading political groups condemned the raid. In a joint statement, they accused the Armenian government of unleashing repressions and discriminating against Karabakh Armenians.