WATCHDOG CONCERNED ABOUT DEATH IN ARMENIAN POLICE CUSTODY
By Ruzanna Stepanian and Emil Danielyan

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
May 18 2007

An international human rights organization has joined its Armenian
counterparts in demanding a "thorough and independent" inquiry into
last week’s death in police custody of a young man widely regarded
as the latest victim of police brutality in Armenia.

Levon Gulian died on Saturday while being questioned at the Armenian
police headquarters as a presumed witness of a deadly shooting that
took place outside his Yerevan restaurant earlier last week. The
police claimed that during the interrogation he tried to escape
through a window but slipped and fell to his death from the second
floor of the police building.

Gulian’s family vehemently rejected this theory, saying that
the 30-year-old father of two was tortured to death by police
investigators. Family members say his body carries numerous traces of
violence and will not be buried until it is examined by independent
forensic experts. More than a dozen of them, joined by Armenian human
rights and other civic activists, demonstrated outside the national
Police Service on Tuesday.

"We will go to the end," said Gulian’s sister Armine. "We will do
everything to have the guilty punished."

"I suspect that Levon’s death was caused by torture. Let the police
prove the opposite," Artak Kirakosian of the Civil Society Institute,
told an ensued news conference.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights (IHF), described these suspicions as
"legitimate" in a letter to Lieutenant-General Hayk Harutiunian,
chief of the Police Service, sent on Thursday. Rhodes cited a "past
record of suspicious cases of death in police custody in Armenia
and the fact that torture and ill-treatment by the police remain
serious problems." He urged Harutiunian to "ensure that all the
circumstances leading to [Gulian’s] death be investigated thoroughly
and independently."

The outcry already forced Harutiunian to order earlier this week an
internal police inquiry into the extraordinary incident, which is
also being investigated by Armenian prosecutors. The Office of the
Prosecutor-General launched a criminal case under an article of the
Armenian Criminal Code that deals with cases where individuals are
forced to commit suicide.

The dead man’s relatives fear this is a sign that the prosecutors
will clear the police of any wrongdoing. They wrote to Prime Minister
Serzh Sarkisian on Tuesday, asking him to prevent what they see as
a high-level cover-up.

Sarkisian assured reporters on Wednesday that he took the relatives’
concerns seriously. "Once the [police] inquiry is over, relevant
bodies will provide information to the public," he said.

Gulian was the owner of a restaurant in Yerevan’s southern Shengavit
district near which a man was shot dead on May 9 in a reported dispute
between two groups of unknown individuals. Gulian was detained and
questioned for two days at Shengavit’s police department. He was set
free only to be again arrested by the Police Service’s Directorate
General of Criminal Investigations. Family members say Gulian told
them that he was badly mistreated by the Shengavit police before being
driven to his last interrogation by Hovik Tamamian, deputy chief of
the feared police unit.

Tamamian is known as a figure close to President Robert Kocharian who
played a major role in a 2004 government crackdown on the Armenian
opposition. He was sacked as chief of central Yerevan’s police
department and given his current post last year, reportedly under
pressure from the police leadership.

Sayad Shirinian, the chief police spokesman, chided the press on
Wednesday for "speculating" about Tamamian’s possible involvement
in the man’s death. "If it is established that Hovik Tamamian was
involved, all of us will condemn him," he said.

According to local and Western watchdogs, torture and mistreatment
in custody are the most common form of human rights violations in
Armenia. The practice seems to have continued unabated since the
Armenian parliament’s ratification in 2002 of the European Convention
for the Prevention of Torture and the European Convention on Human
Rights.