Armenian law-enforcement authorities have dropped corruption charges against a high-ranking Defense Ministry official who was arrested last year, it emerged on Wednesday.
General Melsik Chilingarian was taken into custody in May 2016 ten days after being sacked as head of the ministry’s Department on Armaments which deals with storage, maintenance and repair of weapons and ammunition supplied to the Armenian Armed Forces.
Also arrested was Colonel Armen Markarian, one of Chilingarian’s subordinates who was in charge of vehicles used by the army.Armenia’s Investigative Committee accused the two men of procurement fraud that cost the state 145 million drams ($300,000) in losses.
A uniform-clad Chilingarian was spotted by an RFE/RL correspondent while taking in part in the latest Armenia-Diaspora conference held in Yerevan. He said that he was set free and cleared of any wrongdoing about one month after his arrest. He said investigators found that only Markarian was responsible for the alleged misuse of government money.
The spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee, Sona Truzian, confirmed the information. She said that “large-scale investigative actions” taken by the law-enforcement body found no evidence of corrupt practices or other abuse of power by the general.
Despite being cleared of the corruption charges, Chilingarian was not reinstated in his Defense Ministry post.He said he now only sits on one of the ministry’s advisory bodies.
Chilingarian’s arrest followed the sackings of Deputy Defense Minister Alik Mirzabekian, as well as General Arshak Karapetian, the Armenian military intelligence chief, and General Komitas Muradian, the commander of the Armenian army’s communication units. They came more than three weeks after the outbreak of heavy fighting around Nagorno-Karabakh that nearly escalated into a full-scale Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
The four-day hostilities raised questions about the Armenian military’s apparent lack of prior knowledge of the assault. Critics also suggested that Karabakh Armenian frontline troops did not have sufficient modern weapons and other military equipment when they came under attack.
Both Chilingarian and the Investigative Committee official insisted that the criminal case against him was not connected with the April 2016 war.