ARMENIAN OPPOSITION BLAMES GOVERNMENT FOR POLICE DEATHS IN YEREVAN

Trend News Agency
Jan 9 2009
Azerbaijan

Armenia’s main opposition alliance insisted on Thursday that its
supporters used no firearms in the March 1 clashes with security
forces that left two police servicemen dead, reported Armenialiberty.

Suren Abrahamian, a leading member of the Armenian National Congress
(HAK), said the Armenian police themselves are responsible for the
death of at least one of those servicemen, Captain Hamlet Tadevosian.

Tadevosian commanded a detachment of Armenian interior troops that
clashed with thousands of opposition protesters who barricaded
themselves in downtown Yerevan after security forces broke-up their
non-stop demonstrations in the city’s Liberty Square. According to
state prosecutors, he was killed by a hand grenade thrown at him by
one of the protesters.

Abrahamian, himself a retired police general who served as interior
minister in 1999, brushed aside the official theory, saying that a
combat grenade would have killed more security personnel and left
traces on the ground. He argued that forensic experts claimed to have
found only three pieces of shrapnel in the dead officer’s body.

According to Abrahamian, Tadevosian was most probably killed by an
explosion of a tear gas or stun grenade used by security forces on
that day. "His death was the result of an unprofessional, wrong use
of special means by the authorities," he told journalists. "There is
no way the protesters could have used combat hand grenades," he said.

According to the official version of events, tear gas grenades fired
from a virtually point-blank range killed three of the eight civilians
who lost their lives on March 1. Prosecutor-General reiterated
it at a December 25 meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Marie
Yovanovitch. Hovsepian claimed that only four policeman fired tear
gas during the clashes and that law-enforcement authorities has still
not determined which of them caused the three civilian deaths.

None of more than 100 opposition members and supporters arrested
following the unrest was charged with murdering Tadevosian and the
other police casualty, Tigran Abgarian. The 19-year-old interior
troop conscript was shot and fatally wounded in the neck.