Today is March 1 - No Murder Revealed Yet

The newspaper "Zhoghavorud" reports that today marks the 15th anniversary of the bloody murders on March 1, 2008. The killings of citizens shot dead in the center of Yerevan remain unsolved, even though Nikol Pashinyan had long promised to unveil the case at the level of ‘the precinct’.

On September 11, 2018, when the day of the famous wiretap was revealed, Sassoon Khachatryan, head of the Anti-Corruption Committee (formerly the Special Investigative Service), held a press conference with the director of the NSS, and declared with utmost seriousness: “We have clear evidence that the killings were carried out by special forces, at a time when Kocharian had already imposed a state of emergency, but no military personnel sustained gunshot wounds... Our version is that Tigran Abgaryan received a gunshot wound so that Kocharian’s words about having casualties would be substantiated. This fact is backed by preliminary investigation data.”

To this day, the public knows nothing about that substantiation, while Robert Kocharian has been fully acquitted of all charges related to March 1 by the Constitutional Court, which determined that the charges brought were unlawful. This was not the only blow dealt to Sassoon Khachatryan. Throughout his tenure, especially regarding the March 1 case, he made various statements that were later revealed to be false or unsubstantiated. For example, in another segment of that press conference, he stated: “Uniforms have been distributed from the Ministry of Defense’s reserves to the security units of oligarchs. To whom and for what, I won’t reveal at this moment. You will know at the end of the investigation.” It has been five years since that statement, yet Sassoon Khachatryan has not disclosed who those oligarchs were, who outfitted their security personnel in uniforms and mingled among the public. Moreover, some of those oligarchs have participated in various state events alongside many leaders of law enforcement agencies.

Finally, it should be added that during Nikol Pashinyan's rule, neither Sassoon Khachatryan, nor former prosecutor Arthur Davtyan, nor the current prosecutor Anna Vardpetyan have unveiled any murder related to the March 1 case to this day. No murderer was found behind bars. Although Pashinyan's allies are attempting to erect a memorial dedicated to the victims of March 1, it must be emphasized that Pashinyan came to power with the promise of revealing the events of March 1, not just to place a statue in their memory.

For further details, refer to today's issue of the newspaper.