FREED ARMENIAN SOLDIERS AGAIN RISK IMPRISONMENT
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Feb 28 2007
The three former Armenian soldiers who were sensationally set free
in a high-profile army murder case last December are facing renewed
interrogations by military prosecutors and the possibility of again
finding themselves behind bars.
The conscripts, who spent nearly three years in jail on extremely
controversial murder charges, were summoned to the Military
Prosecutor’s Office on Wednesday for their second joint questioning
in ten days.
During the first interrogation they had to sign a written pledge not
to leave in Armenia pending investigation. Summonses sent to Razmik
Sargsian, Arayik Zalian, and Musa Serobian this month make it clear
that they continue to be accused of murdering two other soldiers of
their unit in Nagorno-Karabakh more than three years ago.
The bodies of Roman Yeghiazarian and Hovsep Mkrtumian bearing traces
of violence were recovered from a reservoir in the north of Karabakh
in January 2004. The military prosecutors maintain that they were
beaten to death by the three young men in a violent dispute over a
food parcel delivered to one of them.
The accusations are essentially based on Sargsian’s April 2004
videotaped testimony in which he confessed to the official version of
events. Sargsian retracted the testimony shortly afterwards, saying
that he was tortured into incriminating himself and his two comrades.
Serobian and Zalian also claim to have been badly mistreated in
custody.
The torture claims were deemed credible by Armenian and international
human rights groups. However, a court in Stepanakert refused to
investigate them, sentencing all three men to 15 years in prison
in 2005. Armenia’s Court of Appeals toughened the sentence to life
imprisonment in May 2006.
In a huge blow to Armenian law-enforcement authorities, the higher
Court of Cassation unexpectedly annulled both verdicts on December 22,
ordering the immediate release of the suspects and an "additional
investigation" into the mysterious killings. But while describing
the criminal case as deeply flawed and lacking evidence, the panel of
six judges stopped short of formally acquitting the former conscripts.
According to Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General, this means
the accusations leveled against Sargsian, Serobian and Zalian still
stand. "If the Court of Cassation believed they are innocent, it would
have acquitted them," said a spokeswoman for the law-enforcement body,
Sona Truzian.
Truzian could not say whether the investigators, all of them replaced
after the December 22 judgment, will be seeking to again put the
freed soldiers on trial. "The decision will be made only after the
additional inquiry is over," she told RFE/RL. "It could take a few
more months. Again, they were not acquitted by the court."
One of the suspects, Arayik Zalian, was separately questioned
on Tuesday by Vartan Smbatian, a military prosecutor leading the
inquiry. Zalian said that the conversation was rather friendly as
Smbatian did not demand that he admit to the charges and instead
asked him about his alleged mistreatment by other interrogators.
"I’m not scared of anything," Zalian told RFE/RL before heading to
Smbatian’s office with the two other young men. "Let them interrogate
me as long as they want, but they are wasting their time. They
interrogated me for three years. What else do they want to know?"
The accused trio’s main lawyer, Zaruhi Postanjian, appears confident
that her clients will not end up in the dock. "I don’t think they will
again throw the boys into jail," she told RFE/RL. "They just want us to
stop demanding punishment of the real murderers that remain at large."
Postanjian and two other defense attorneys have repeatedly suggested
that the real perpetrator of killings is Captain Ivan Grigorian,
a Karabakh Armenian officer who commanded the army unit where the
accused and dead soldiers served. The commander of the Karabakh army,
Lieutenant-General Seyran Ohanian, only reinforced these suspicions
in early 2004 when he asked military prosecutors not to bring charges
against Grigorian in view of the latter’s contribution to the Armenian
military victor over Azerbaijan.
The defense lawyers are also demanding criminal proceedings against
military prosecutors and other law-enforcement officers that
allegedly tortured their clients and committed other violations of
due process. The European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg is
now considering taking up a relevant case filed by them.
The Armenian Court of Cassation likewise faulted the lower courts
for refusing to investigate the torture claims. Though not a
full acquittal, its 29-page ruling is a damning indictment of the
military prosecutors’ handling of a murder case highlighting dozens
of out-of-combat deaths that occur in the Armenian army each year. The
full text of the verdict was released only a month ago.
It was the first known case of an Armenian judicial body rebuffing the
prosecutors. Human rights campaigners hope that it set an important
precedent for judicial independence in the country.
"The Court of Cassation concludes that this case has seen such
violations of the law on procedural justice that precluded an
objective, comprehensive and full investigation and can not be
eliminated during a judicial process," read the verdict. It said both
the investigators and lower courts violated provisions of Armenian laws
stipulating that criminal accusations must only stem from sufficient
factual evidence. "A guilty verdict can not be based on presumptions,"
the court said.
Anahit Yeghiazarian, the trial prosecutor who pressed charges against
Sargsian, Serobian and Zalian, will not necessarily agree. Making her
case in the Court of Appeals in April last year, Yeghiazarian said:
"I am guided not only by evidence but also by my internal conviction."