Epress.am News from Armenia
A year and a half has passed since the death of conscript soldier Sevak Khachatryan; Armenian courts have closed the criminal case into the death, finding that the circumstances of his death were apparent. Ani Chatinyan, lawyer for Sevak’s legal successor, is convinced on the other hand that the investigative body has left a number of questions over the incident unanswered.
On April 12, 2016, Armenia’s Investigative Committee issued a statement, in which it said that conscript Sevak N Khachatryan had been discovered in the observation post of one of Armenian defense ministry’s military units with a fatal gunshot wound to his head. Subsequently, a criminal case was launched on an article on violation of the the rules of safe gun handling and sent to the Syunik court of first instance, which, like the Appeals and Cassation Courts in the future, upheld the investigator’s decision to terminate the criminal proceedings.
An Epress.am correspondent recently paid a visit to the family of the deceased soldier; his mother, Melanya Hovsepyan, and brother still do not believe that the cause of Sevak’s death has been established.
Sevak, the mother said, was drafted into the army on January 21, 2016. He first served in a Goris military unit, but was transferred to Nagorno-Karabakh during the April escalation on the line of contact between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces: “None of us believes that he accidentally shot himself. Besides, they had no right to take a soldier of three months to an observation post… He wasn’t even given time to learn how to shoot properly.”
Lawyer Chatinyan, in turn, told us that neither the investigation’s objectivity nor comprehensiveness was ensured by law enforcement officials; “There are circumstances in the case which were not investigated properly if at all.”
According to the case materials, in addition to his own service weapon, Khachatryan had also been given the weapon of a soldier who was hospitalized at the time of the incident. “Who was this soldier? Why had he been taken to a hospital? Was his condition serious? Does this claim even correspond to the reality? The investigative body did not even attempt to find answers to these questions,” Chatinyan argued.
“They also failed to find out whether Khachatryan had had any issues with other conscripts or higher-ranking officers. They did not establish whether the shot was fired from a distance or at close range. They did not take into consideration the fact that the shot had not left any burn marks on Sevak’s face, which would have been the case had the shot been fired at close range,” the lawyer continued, adding that she planned to file an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights and demand that the death case is reopened.