ANOTHER ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT ATTACK CONVICT DIES IN PRISON
Arman Hovannisian, Ruzanna Stepanian
rticle/2044912.html
17.05.2010
Armenia – Footage of the October 27 terrorist act in the Armenian
Parliament, Yerevan, 27Oct, 1999
One of the seven men convicted in a 1999 deadly attack on Armenia’s
parliament was found dead in his prison cell at the weekend. Armenian
prison authorities said they have launched an investigation to
ascertain the cause of Hamlet Stepanian’s sudden death.
They did not announce any results of the inquiry as of Monday evening.
Stepanian was serving a 14-year prison sentence which he had received
for allegedly helping five gunmen burst into the National Assembly and
spray it with bullets on October 27, 1999. The then Prime Minister
Vazgen Sarkisian, parliament speaker Karen Demirchian and six other
officials were killed in the shooting spree that thrust Armenia’s
government into turmoil.
The gunmen led by Nairi Hunanian, an obscure former journalist,
surrendered to police after overnight negotiations with then President
Robert Kocharian. All of them were tried, together with Stepanian,
and sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2003.
In a short statement, a Justice Ministry department managing Armenia’s
prisons said Stepanian died in his bed in Yerevan’s Nubarashen jail
late on Saturday. It said an initial examination of his body found no
"traces of violence." An ongoing official inquiry involving detailed
forensic examinations will determine the exact cause of the convict’s
death, added the statement.
As part of that inquiry, four members of a non-governmental council
monitoring prison conditions in Armenia were allowed to be present
at an autopsy conducted by state forensic experts. One of them, Laura
Galstian, suggested on Monday that Stepanian died of a heart attack.
Armenia – Nairi Hunanian, a former journalist, the ringleader of the
group that committed the terrorist act of October 27, 1999
"We found no other suspicious facts," Galstian told RFE/RL’s Armenian
service. "This is our preliminary conclusion, but we will wait for
the final results of the forensic-medical examinations."
Galstian, who herself is a doctor, cited prison medics as saying
that Stepanian had no history of serious heart trouble. "The same was
confirmed by his relatives, including a cousin whom we have met," she
said. "She last visited him with a parcel ten days ago, she kept in
touch with him by phone, and he did not voice any [heart] complaints."
Galstian said she and the three other members of the monitoring council
have also talked to 16 other inmates at Nubarashen who shared the same
prison cell with Stepanian. "They told us that they jointly had dinner
[with Stepanian on Saturday evening] and that half an hour later he
said he is feeling unwell and has to go to bed. Then his prison mates
heard a wheezing sound but were unable to help him."
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Armenian service, Aghasi Atabekian, a lawyer
who defended Stepanian in the 2001-2003 trial, pointedly declined
to exclude the possibility of his former client’s murder. Atabekian
pointed to the past deaths of two other parliament attack suspects.
One of them, Norayr Yeghiazarian, was found dead in pre-trial detention
in 2000, several months after being charged with supplying weapons
to the gunmen, among them Hunanian’s younger brother Karen and uncle
Vram Galstian. Law-enforcement authorities said at the time that
Yeghiazarian, an electrician by profession, accidentally electrocuted
himself to death while using a heating stove in his cell.
And in 2004, Vram Galstian was found hanged at Nubarashen. The prison
administration claimed that he committed suicide.
Both prison deaths fuelled more allegations of a high-level cover-up
of the parliament shootings by relatives and supporters of the
assassinated officials. Some of them still suspect Kocharian and the
current President Serzh Sarkisian (no relation to Vazgen), who was
Armenia’s national security minister in October 1999, of masterminding
the killings to eliminate increasingly powerful government rivals.
Hunanian insisted throughout his marathon trial that the decision
to seize the National Assembly and change what he denounced as a
corrupt and undemocratic government had been taken by himself without
anybody’s orders. But many in Armenia believe that the ringleader and
his accomplices had powerful sponsors outside the parliament building.