Gunshots were fired as two groups of men clashed at a Yerevan car wash for still unknown reasons. Armenia’s Investigative Committee said a 42-year-old man was accidentally shot and killed by his brother.
The law-enforcement agency did not identify two other men who it said were wounded in the fight. According to unconfirmed news reports, one of them was Lyudvig Gyulnazarian, who has run the community comprising nine villages for less than six months. The largest of those villages, Parakar, is located just a few kilometers west of the Armenian capital.
Gyulnazarian, who is a member of Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party, has not publicly commented on the incident or his decision to step down. He could not be reached for comment on Monday. The car wash in question is reportedly owned by a friend of his.
Vahagn Aleksanian, a deputy chairman of the party led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, said the very fact of Gyulnazarian’s presence at the scene of the shooting was “questionable” in itself and had to entail a “political consequence” regardless of the outcome of the criminal inquiry launched by the Investigative Committee.
“A state or local official must not allow themselves to do such a thing,” Aleksanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
The shooting happened one day after Pashinian expressed serious concern about a significant increase in gun violence in Armenia during his rule. He ordered law-enforcement authorities to do more to tackle what he called a “very big problem.”
Official statistics show that a total of 68 armed robberies, shootouts and other firearm-related crimes were committed in the country in the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year increase of almost 55 percent. Opposition politicians and other critics blame Pashinian’s administration for the increased number of these and other crimes.
Civil Contract installed Gyulnazarian as mayor of Parakar and the nearby villages two and a half years after being defeated by an opposition party, Aprelu Yerkir, in the last local election. It teamed up with another political group to controversially prevent Aprelu Yerkir from taking over the local government.
The group’s leader became the community chief amid allegations of foul play made by Aprelu Yerkir. He ceded the post to Gyulnazarian earlier this year under the terms of a power-sharing deal struck with Pashinian’s party.