Anahit Khalatian, the 70-year-old candidate of a local opposition bloc, her 75-year-old friend, Kima Hayrapetian, and the third woman, who is said to be in her 90s, were snatched from a car and taken to a detention center in Yerevan on suspicion of paying or receiving vote bribes. The latter was freed without charge on Monday while Khalatian and Hayrapetian remained in custody as of Tuesday afternoon. They too were not formally charged yet.
Arsen Babayan, Khalatian’s lawyer, said that officers of the Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) threatened the women with long prison sentences. He said the oldest of them was hit in the head and had her walking stick taken away from her. The ACC denied the allegations.
Hayrapetian’s lawyer, Ruben Melikian, said his client was “subjected to serious psychological pressure” but not physically abused.
“Tears were streaming down her face,” Melikian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “She said to me, ‘My son, why did they bring me here?’ I didn’t know what to answer.”
Babayan insisted that Khalatian was only trying to help her older companions go to a polling station and cast their ballots there. She did not pay them money, he said.
Babayan’s client ran for the municipal council on the ticket of the Our City bloc of Martun Grigorian, an Armenian opposition lawmaker based in Gyumri. The bloc finished third in the ballot, garnering almost 16 percent of the vote.
Grigorian held a news conference on Sunday afternoon to condemn the women’s arrests. Eight other opposition activists, including his father and son, were arrested on Thursday. They all were freed after being charged with giving or promising vote bribes or engaging in election-related benevolence which is also not allowed by Armenian law.
Grigorian and other local opposition figures rejected the accusations as politically motivated. They claimed for their part that the ruling Civil Contract party heavily and illegally abused government resources in a bid to win the ballot. No criminal proceedings are known to have been launched as a result of the opposition allegations.