The Investigative Committee said that the 30-year-old Russian citizen was brought in for questioning at one of its divisions one day after police arrested him for receiving “parcels containing narcotics.”
It said that the handcuffed suspect was escorted out of an interrogation room located on the fifth floor and reached a “door leading to the elevator.”
“As soon as the door opened, he unexpectedly quickly approached an open window next to the elevator and jumped out of it, dying as a result,” the committee added in a late-night statement. It did not identify the suspect.
The statement stressed that the interrogation was filmed and attended by his lawyer. As of Friday afternoon, the still unknown lawyer did not publicly comment on what the investigators described as an “accident.”
Artur Sakunts, a human rights activist, decried the man’s death. He said the law-enforcement agency is “directly responsible” for it even if the official version of events is true.
It is not clear whether a criminal case was opened in connection with the deadly incident.
Human rights groups say that ill-treatment of criminal suspects remains widespread in Armenia despite sweeping law-enforcement reforms promised by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government. Law-enforcement officers are still rarely prosecuted or fired for such offenses.
As recently as on June 22, a man in Yerevan claimed that the Investigative Committee chief, Argishti Kyaramian, personally tortured and threatened to kill him following his arrest on June 17. A spokesman for Kyaramian denied the allegations.