Who are you to tear down Nikol's picture? The attackers of the girl who removed Pashinyan's photo have been found guilty.

On June 20, 2020, the day of the extraordinary parliamentary elections, Mariam Aydinyan, a resident of the Erebuni administrative district, noticed Nikol Pashinyan's campaign poster on the walls of polling stations 10/24 and 10/25. She asked the police to remove it and not violate the law. “I asked the police to take down the poster; before that, I had gone to fulfill my civic duty,” Mariam told ArmDaily.am.

After casting her vote, Mariam approached the police and asked if they had removed the poster. “The police said they couldn’t take it down, so I thought as a citizen, I shouldn’t allow the law to be broken,” she said.

Mariam approached the poster and tried to pull it off the wall when two women approached her and started insulting her. “They were saying all sorts of things, cursing me, even insulting my recently deceased father. I asked why they were insulting my father, who had just died, and they responded, ‘That’s why I’m doing this,’” Mariam recounted in our conversation.

Mariam was with her mother and sister at the time. “Then, when I said this is a violation of the law, they started hitting me. They were a mother and daughter; the mother scratched my face, and the daughter was pulling my hair and hitting my head,” Mariam described.

When asked why they acted that way, the women replied, “Who are you to tear down Nikol's picture?” Mariam tried to explain multiple times that campaigning inside the polling station was prohibited, but the two attacking her simply wouldn’t listen. “My mother and sister were trying to pull them away from me so they wouldn’t harm me, and I was trying to protect my head to avoid getting seriously hurt,” she continued.

This entire incident was witnessed by the police, who approached them. “The police came and tried to calm those women down, while I was filming the whole thing. Then, when things finally settled a bit, the police filed a report on the spot,” she said, adding that a court session had been held yesterday regarding this case, and today the court's decision was published.

Thus, the two women who attacked citizen Mariam Aydinyan and inflicted bodily injuries upon her were found guilty under Articles 117 and 118 of the Criminal Code. One of the women is obliged to pay 60,000 drams, while the other 40,000 drams, and they face up to 2 months of imprisonment. “In reality, no matter whose picture it was, I would have torn it down because I don’t belong to any party or coalition, and that was a violation of the law. The important thing is that such people are punished once so that they won’t do something like this again in the future,” Mariam Aydinyan concluded.