Another suspect in the case, Tigran Arakelian, alleged on June 22 that Kyaramian and the chief of the Investigative Committee’s Yerevan division, Azat Gevorgian, beat him up in the latter’s office during his initial, brief detention. Arakelian was moved to house arrest earlier in June after being charged with blackmailing state officials. Kyaramian dismissed through a spokesman his “baseless” allegations before prosecutors ordered another law-enforcement agency, the National Security Service (NSS), to investigate them.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General revealed that the three other suspects also claimed to have also been ill-treated by Kyaramian in custody.
A lawyer representing one of the suspects, Artak Mkrtumian, said his client first alleged such violence when representatives of Armenia’s Office of the Human Rights Defender visited him shortly after his arrest.
“He said he doesn’t want to file a complaint for fear of further torture and also because he fears for the safety of his relatives,” the lawyer, Levon Baghdasarian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
According to Baghdasarian, such a complaint was lodged by another suspect, Artak Galstian. The latter is the nominal head of a small party set up by the blogger, Vartan Ghukasian.
A former police officer nicknamed Dog, Ghukasian is notorious for using profanities to attack both Armenia’s current leaders and their political foes in videos posted on YouTube. The Investigative Committee charged Ghukasian with extortion, calls for violence and contempt of court before a Yerevan court issued in May an international arrest warrant for him. The U.S.-based blogger denies the accusations.
The committee arrested Arakelian again and had him remanded in pre-trial custody last week after brining more criminal charges against him. It claimed, in particular, that he helped Ghukasian discredit a judge who allowed investigators to hold the other suspects in detention. Their torture allegations are also denied by the law-enforcement agency.
“With baseless and ludicrous allegations, they are trying to undermine public trust in the objectivity of the ongoing criminal investigation into the case involving them and facts uncovered by it,” a spokesman for Kyaramian said in written comments to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
He expressed hope that the NSS will assess their behavior accordingly. The NSS has not indicted Kyaramian or any other law-enforcement official so far.
“I have the impression that they are investigating [the torture claims] just for the sake of investigation,” Baghdasarian said in his regard.
Zaruhi Hovannisian, a human rights campaigner, was also worried about an official cover-up of the alleged torture. Hovannisian and other activists say that ill-treatment of criminal suspects remains widespread in Armenia despite sweeping law-enforcement reforms promised by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government.
Kyaramian, 32, is widely regarded as one of Pashinian’s trusted lieutenants, having held five high-level positions in the Armenian security apparatus and government since 2018.