The nine defendants and two dozen other gunmen stormed the base to demand that then President Serzh Sarkisian free Zhirayr Sefilian, the jailed leader of their radical opposition movement, and step down.
The 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.
All but two members of the armed group called Sasna Tsrer were released from custody shortly after Sarkisian was toppled in the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” led by Nikol Pashinian.
Armenia - Relatives of police officers killed in a standoff with opposition gunmen attend a remembrance ceremony in Yerevan, 28Sep2016.
The two other members remained behind bars because of facing murder charges denied by them. One of them, Armen Bilian, was set free in February this year when a Yerevan court acquitted him of killing one of the three policemen following a high-profile trial of the nine former gunmen.
The Court of Appeals accepted prosecutors’ demand to overturn the acquittal and sentence Bilian to 25 years in prison. He was arrested again in the courtroom.
The court upheld a 25-year-old prison sentence for Smbat Barseghian, another defendant convicted of killing the two other policemen. The prosecutors sought a life imprisonment for him.
The court also rejected appeals filed by the seven other Sasna Tsrer members whom the lower court sentenced to between 6 and 8 years in prison. Unlike Bilian, they will remain free pending an appeal to the higher Court of Cassation and its decision on the case.
Armenia - Varuzhan Avetisian (L), the leader an armed opposition group that seized a police station in July 2016, at the start of his trial in Yerevan, 8Jun2017.
Varuzhan Avetisian, the Sasna Tsrer leader who got a 7-year jail term, has repeatedly defended the armed attack on the police facility located in Yerevan’s southern Erebuni district. Avetisian and the other defendants deny the charges leveled against them.
The 2016 attack was condemned by the United States and the European Union. “We abhor the actions of Sasna Tsrer and others who use violence or who threaten to harm others to serve their political agenda,” Richard Mills, the then U.S. ambassador to Armenia, said in 2018.