Epress.am News from Armenia
“You're a grown man; how did you feel when you saw your mom having relations with some azeri? Was that alright with you?” Lyudvig Avetisyan, a lawyer for a Yerevan man accused of stabbing his wife to death in 2015, asked the victim's teenage son as he took the witness stand Wednesday in Yerevan's Malatia-Sebastia district court. Only after attendees at the hearing had protested against this and Avetisyan's other questions being manifestations of racism and discrimination did the defense lawyer change the tone of his questions.
During the testimony that lasted nearly two hours, 14-year-old Karen Arakelyan said he had witnessed his mother's brutal abuse at the hands of his father for years. He also spoke of the regular violence defendant Artak Arakelyan subjected him and his 8-year-old sister to.
“He'd put us in the corner at night for 3-4 hours, and my little sister even fainted on one such occasion. There were times when my dad just sat there watched his father beating my mother when she had just had her appendix removed. We've never been close to our father; he wouldn't let us keep in touch with mom's relatives and would initiate meaningless and unfounded arguments with her.”
The teenage witness added that the accused, along with his relatives, even wanted to take the victim, 38-year-old Heghine Darbazyan, to a mental hospital, claiming that the cause of the endless family disputes and fights was the woman's mental illness.
As for his mother's alleged intimate relationship with Nadik, an Azerbaijani merchant living in Turkey, Karen Arakelyan insisted that his family had “normal trade relations” with the man. His mother, the witness said, used Skype to keep in touch with Nadik and discussed solely business-related issues with him.