Former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan was arrested on Friday on charges of ‘overthrowing the constitutional order of Armenia’, which is being alleged by the Special Investigation Service. The SIS submitted a petition to the Primary Court of General Jurisdiction requesting Kocharyan’s detention as a preventive measure to head him off as a flight risk. The Secretary-General of the Collective Security (CSTO), Colonel-General Yuri Khachaturov, has also been charged with ‘overthrowing the constitutional order of Armenia’.
PanArmenian reports
Former president Robert Kocharyan was apprehended for two months on Friday, July 27 after being charged with overthrowing the constitutional order of Armenia back on March 1, 2008.
According to the Special Investigation Service, Kocharyan overthrew the constitutional order of Armenia by prior agreement with other persons.
The investigator had submitted a petition to the court of general jurisdiction of the first instance of Yerevan to name detention as a preventive measure against the ex-President.
Kocharyan was summoned for interrogation on Thursday as a witness in an investigation into the post-presidential election crackdown on March 1, 2008. Eight civilians and two police officers were killed immediately after the election of a new President 10 years ago.
Secretary-General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Colonel-General Yuri Khachaturov, who commanded the Yerevan garrison of the Armenian Armed Forces on March 1, 2008, has also been charged with overthrowing the constitutional order of Armenia
The Investigation Service announced earlier that it had charged Armenia’s defense minister at the time of the March 1, 2008 incident, General Mikayel Harutyunyan, with illegally mobilizing the country’s Armed Forces against peaceful demonstrators, calling it a “breach of constitutional order.”
Kocharyan replaced the disgraced Levon Ter-Petrossian as the President of Armenia in 2008. Petrossian lost the favour of the Armenian public over a private deal to deliver the Nagorno-Karabakh region to Azerbaijan right after a bloody war had been fought between the two nations over the territory, which many Armenians fought and died for. The 2008 election saw Serzh Sargsyan elected to the presidency, but which election saw protests, organized in part by the interference of foreign Western backed NGOs. Conflicts which occurred in those protests realized the deaths of several Armenians, which Nikol Pashinyan was imprisoned for his role in. Pashinyan, who was a part of Ter-Petrossian’s party, has now ousted Sargsyan and, as the new president, is apparently out to get his political enemies in a situation that looks not too different from the current situation going down with Ecuador’s former president Rafael Correa, with politically motivated arrests.
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