Epress.am News from Armenia
After being released from the police station, Armenian National Congress (HAK) youth activists, who had been detained while handing out leaflets and kept in police custody for a few hours yesterday, shared with Epress.am the details of their ordeal.
One of the youth who were detained, Areg Gevorgyan, said a police officer approached them on the eve of Feb. 24 on Abovyan St. and said, “You can stop distributing [those].”
“I told him he’s making meaningless demands and we’re going to distribute [the leaflets]. I even gave him a leaflet. Then, when we crossed the Moskovyan St. intersection, we split on two sidewalks and they were coming up behind us, the Police Patrol Service officers were coming and three red berets [officers]. When we crossed Sayat-Nova, there they increased. And when we reached Northern Ave., the cars came and stopped, there were three police vehicles, the rest were regular cars, I didn’t have a chance to count them. They came out, attacked the leaflets; they said, give us the leaflets. The attackers were Amirkhanyan (Gebels), Arayik Petrosyan, all the employees of the crime [unit] who we know,” he said.
According to Gevorgyan, at that time, the officers hit the youth.
“And we began to shout, ‘Serzhik Mubarak,’ ‘Serzhik murderer’ [referring to Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan], and ‘March 1 rally.’ We were going to continue along our way when they came up behind us, very rough with all of us, including the girls; they sat us in their car and took us to the [police] division,” he said.
Hermine Matevosyan, one of the girls who were detained, said uniformed people, who for her are not police officers since they didn’t identify themselves, attacked them. Tatevik Poghpatyan added, “We felt them following us, they were about 30 people, both in civilian clothes and in uniforms; without identifying themselves, they began to tug [at us] and said, ‘you’re not going to distribute [the flyers]; we said, ‘say the rule’; they responded, ‘we’re not speaking with you of the law, we’re just saying, give us the leaflets and go.’ Then they ripped the leaflets, pushed and pulled the boys, hit [us] and somehow or another got us in their cars and took us away.”
According to another detainee, Mariam Muradyan, one officer who shoved her into the car also snatched her phone.
“When I raised this issue at the [police] division, at first they said they didn’t take the phone, and when I saw my phone [in the hands of] the person who seized it and raised the issue, they said they’ve confiscated my phone, and only after we made some noise, a little while later, they returned my phone,” she said.
Note as well that until releasing the youth, police, according to the young activists, were occasionally pushing the dozen or so youth gathered outside Yerevan police central division. HAK representative Davit Shahnazaryan, who was trying to calm the situation, cautioned the police: “Now the person in civilian clothes will be a police officer who if he’s not going to identify himself and will try to commit an unlawful act will receive a dog’s beating.”