Armenian Police Raid Offices and Home of Political Group
• Naira Bulghadarian
RFE/RL Armenian Service
Investigators raided on Friday the offices of a fringe political group increasingly critical of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in connection with an armed attacked on a police station in Yerevan carried out by its supporters.
They also searched the homes of Zhirayr Sefilian, the leader of the pro-Western group called the National Democratic Alliance (AZhB), and several of his associates. No new arrests were reported immediately after the raids.
“They checked and messed up everything,” Sefilian’s son Vahagn told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “They didn’t let us get close and see what they are doing. They also entered my room and looked up everything in my computer.”
Ara Papian, a senior AZhB member also targeted by the investigators, condemned the searches, saying that the authorities are trying to “demonize” his organization by unjustly implicating it in the attack.
The three attackers detonated a hand grenade at the entrance to the police headquarters of Yerevan’s Nor Nork district on March 24. Two of them were seriously wounded in the explosion while the other, Stepan Hovakimian, threatened to set off another grenade before being detained by security forces.
In a video address aired on Facebook just before the attack, Hovakimian expressed outrage at the brief detentions of several AZhB members and supporters who visited contested border areas in Armenia’s northern Tavush province which Pashinian wants to unilaterally hand over to Azerbaijan.
The AZhB leadership denied any responsibility for the attack. Still, Papian sought to justify it, saying that the three men attempted to launch an “uprising.” “They have the right to revolt,” he told reporters.
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. The three dozen 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 of them were released from custody shortly after Sarkisian was toppled in the 2018 “velvet revolution” led by Pashinian. The seven key members of the group called Sasna Tsrer were sent back to jail in May 2022.
