There were more indications that the attack is connected with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s controversial plans to unilaterally hand over contested border areas in Armenia’s northern Tavush province to Azerbaijan.
Two of the attackers were seriously wounded in the explosion while the other, Stepan Hovakimian, threatened to set off another grenade during a two-hour standoff with security forces. He was eventually detained by them.
It emerged that Hovakimian, 34, aired a video address on Facebook just before the attack. He expressed outrage at the arrest of several members or supporters of the National Democratic Alliance (AZhB) who visited the border areas to show solidarity with residents of nearby Tavush villages rejecting Pashinian’s plans.
The AZhB confirmed that the three attackers are its supporters but denied any connection with their actions. One of the group’s senior members, Hermine Mkrtchian, described the attack as an emotional “outburst.”
"We learned about the incident from the press,” Mkrtchian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
A short statement posted on the AZhB’s Facebook page said police began searching the apartments of its supporters early in the morning. It was not clear whether any of them was detained as a result. Armenia’s Investigative Committee said only that law-enforcement officers are conducting searches and taking other “large-scale” actions as part of an ongoing investigation into Sunday’s incident.
Armenia - National Democratic Allliance leader Zhirayr Sefilian speaks at a rally in Yerevan, Febuary 26, 2021.
The AZhB leaders have close ties to jailed members of an armed group that stormed another Yerevan police station in 2016 to demand that then President Serzh Sarkisian step down. Like mainstream opposition forces, the AZhB has condemned the territorial concessions signaled by Pashinian.
Earlier on Sunday, the police detained 49 members of another group, called Combat Brotherhood, who were about to visit one of the affected Tavush villages to hold the next session of “tactical” military training for local men. A police statement claimed that they were rounded up on suspicion of illegal arms possession. All of them were released without a charge several hours later.
The Combat Brotherhood leader, Hrant Ter-Abrahamian, said on Monday that the authorities are simply cracking down on anyone standing in the way of Armenian withdrawal from four ruined and deserted Azerbaijani villages occupied by Armenian forces in 1991-1992. He said the detentions will not deter his organization from continuing its activities in Tavush and challenging Pashinian’s policy.
Ter-Abrahamian dismissed Pashinian’s claims that Azerbaijan will invade Armenia unless it unconditionally cedes the former villages strategically located along one of the two main Armenian highways leading to Georgia. “The war against Armenia has not ended for a second, neither on the propaganda nor the military fronts,” he told a news conference.
Armenia - Former human rights ombudsman Arman Tatoyan speaks to RFE/RL, March 25, 2024.
Many residents of the border villages in Tavush argue that they will lose access to their agricultural land, have trouble communicating with the rest of the country and be far more vulnerable to Azerbaijani armed attacks if Pashinian does cede the adjacent areas to Azerbaijan. Visiting two of those villages on March 18, the prime minister admitted that in return for such withdrawal, Baku would not give back any Armenian territory seized by Azerbaijani troops at the same border section in the early 1990s.
Armenia’s main opposition groups have warned that such concessions would amount to high treason. One of their leaders, former Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian, last week urged the Armenian military to defy Pashinian’s withdrawal orders.
Arman Tatoyan, Armenia’s former human rights ombudsman critical of the government, also expressed serious concern at Pashinian’s stated intentions. He shrugged off the premier’s claims that the handover would mark the beginning of a delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
“What is happening now and is described by the government as delimitation has nothing to do with border delimitation,” Tatoyan said, pointing to the absence of any mutually agreed mechanism, notably maps, for delineating the long Armenian-Azerbaijani frontier.
“Besides, according to established international practice, delimitation or demarcation cannot be carried out by causing human suffering,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.