Former President Robert Kocharian was banned from leaving Armenia on Sunday as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian reaffirmed his pledges to imprison him and the leaders of other major opposition groups accusing him of rigging the June 7 parliamentary elections.
Kocharian’s office announced earlier in the day that he is leaving for Russia on a three-day private visit which it said had been planned beforehand. It said late in the evening that the leader of the opposition Hayastan alliance was “illegally and without any explanation” not allowed to board a flight to Moscow at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport.
A news website controlled by Pashinian’s Civil Contract party was the first to report the travel ban. Pashinian claimed shortly afterwards that Kocharian and two other top opposition leaders will not be allowed to flee the country because he won a popular mandate to “bring to their knees” and “destroy” them.
“If it even occurs to any shoe licker of [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev that President Kocharian might flee the country, he is sorely mistaken,” shot back Bagrat Mikoyan, the ex-president’s spokesman. “One person will flee Armenia, and that one person is Aliyev’s poodle.”
Kocharian’s Hayastan, billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance and the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) led by another wealthy businessman, Gagik Tsarukian, were the ruling Civil Contract party’s main election challengers. They refuse to recognize Civil Contract’s victory in the polls, rejecting the official vote results as fraudulent. Several other opposition groups have also accused Pashinian of rigging the elections.
Pashinian has repeatedly vowed to jail Kocharian, Karapetian and Tsarukian in recent weeks. Law-enforcement authorities charged Tsarukian with tax evasion and banned him from leaving the country on June 9.
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