- Ruzanna Stepanian
Following mass arrests of members and supporters of billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance, law-enforcement officers raided on Friday the offices of a media outlet linked to it two days before Armenia’s parliamentary elections.
Editors and journalists of ArmatMedia.am were effectively locked up inside their offices as the National Security Service (NSS) and the Investigative Committee officers searched them for more than five hours. The investigators confiscated the reporters’ computers and mobile phones.
“The first thing they did was to log into our social media pages on our computers,” Aghavni Sukiasian, an ArmatMedia.am editor, told reporters. “And what was remarkable was that they connected the USBs they brought with them to our [main] office computer. So we don’t know what [incriminating] information their USBs contained and whether they downloaded it to the computer.”
Another editor, Nelly Avetisian, accused Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of ordering the raid as part of an ongoing crackdown on Strong Armenia, which is widely regarded as the ruling Civil Contract party’s main election challenger.
The Investigative Committee said that the search was conducted as part of a criminal case against Aleksan Aleksanian, the online outlet’s owner and a leading member of the Karapetian’s bloc who was arrested on vote-buying charges on Tuesday
According to the committee, since last September Aleksanian has hired some 1,400 people to work for a non-governmental organization that formed the backbone of Karapetian’s opposition movement. It claims that they were paid to attend the movement’s rallies under the guise of their wages. Both Aleksanian and Strong Armenia reject the accusations as politically motivated.
Citing the same probe, investigators on Thursday raided Strong Armenia’s 50 campaign offices across the country and indicted 37 more members of the bloc as a result. Twenty-five of them were placed under arrest.
Hundreds of other Strong Armenia members or supporters have been arrested in recent months on similar charges. The authorities have opened a smaller number of such criminal cases against two other major opposition groups running in the elections. The three opposition contenders accuse them of acting on Pashinian’s orders to disrupt their election campaigns, intimidate their activists and thus increase the ruling party’s reelection chances.
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Disclaimer: This article was contributed and translated into English by Emil Lazarian. While we strive for quality, the views and accuracy of the content remain the responsibility of the contributor. Please verify all facts independently before reposting or citing.
Direct link to this article: https://www.armenianclub.com/2026/06/06/opposition-media-outlet-raided-on-election-eve/
