Did the Bodyguards Exist?
Suzan Simonyan
Story from Lragir.am News:
Published: 17:33:35 – 24/09/2011
On the Independence Day, the president awarded Vardan Mamikonyan Medal
to the deputy chief of the General Staff of the Army, Haykaz
Baghmanyan. And yesterday the military prosecutor Kostanyan finally
refused to mention the room of Baghmanyan’s bodyguards in the criminal
case on the death of Tigran Ohanjanyan, the serviceman allegedly
killed by electric shock in the military unit of Karchaghbyur.
In 2006, Baghmanyan’s bodyguards lived in this room 5-6 meters from
which the body of the serviceman was found.
`I say Mr. Kostanyan, in your presence, we asked several people, and
they confirmed it was their room. So why don’t you mention it as the
room of the bodyguards, and you mention it as radio station?’ says
Tigran’s father, Suren Ohanjanyan. The military prosecutor answered:
`What’s the difference how it will be mentioned?’
The father of the victim hoped the military prosecutor would make the
investigators mention this room in the chart of examination and
further interrogate the bodyguards, but on hearing the military
prosecutor’s answer, he lost patience, interrupted the meeting and
left the room. Kostanyan had just enough time to remind that he
returned to Ohanjanyan’s case upon the instruction of the president.
The young man who returned from the Russian city of Piatigorsk in 2006
died in mysterious circumstances in a year after starting his military
service. His death was reportedly caused by electric shock. Meanwhile,
Tigran’s parents are sure that their son was beaten to death by the
bodyguards of Lieutenant-General Haykaz Baghanyan, the commander of
the corpus and Serzh Sargsyan’s friend. They joined other parents who
had lost their sons during their military service at peace time. Suren
saw Serzh Sargsyan behind the fence of his office five years later. He
promised the parents that the new military prosecutor will deal with
the cases of soldiers.
First Tigran’s parents did not believe that the fake story would
change. They announced that their son was killed by the bodyguards who
were not even summoned to court.
But when Kostanyan visited Vardenis, the military unit of Karchaghbyur
and officially announced that the scene had been falsified in the
records, the parents were again full of hope. This statement kept them
inspired for another 6 months. The parents of soldiers continued to
roam from one instance to another, living with hopes coming PR
bubbles.
The PR bubble finally burst on September 16 when the new investigator,
Levon Petrosyan, presented the protocol of the investigative
experiment to Suren Ohanjanyan. The document read that the injury on
Tigran’s neck could have been caused by contact with the electric
wire.
`I was present at the investigative experiment. They had found a boy
of nearly the same height as Tigran. They had him touch the freshly
painted wire but the line was never perpendicular. The line of his
neck was straight. They falsified the protocol to match with the
forensic conclusion.’
The protocol of the examination of the place was not drawn up in the
presence of the performing group as the attorney of the victim had
demanded but months later. Ohanjanyan’s attorney Seda Safaryan says:
`In fact, they were unable to simulate a picture through the
investigative experiment to combine the contact of the neck and hand
of the victim with the wire of the radio station. I think at first
they were ashamed of recording the opposite thing because the factual
circumstances do not correspond with the reality. After months of
expectation, the false statement that the neck injury could have been
caused by contact with the wire was finally included in the document.’
I am afraid they tend to cover up the case, she says.
Most details of the case simply do not exist. The bodyguards do not
exist, there is no law which allows the chief of the General Staff to
have bodyguards, the room of the bodyguards does not exist either. And
the room is mentioned as a passport check point rather than the room
of bodyguards.
P.S. We expected to get the answers to several questions raised in
this article from the Military Prosecutor’s Office of Armenia but
nobody answered our questions.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.lragir.am/engsrc/society23504.html