Epress.am News from Armenia
Gevorg Tasunyan, a reporter for Armenian legal news portal Iravaban.net, was attacked by plainclothes police officers on July 21 while covering the violent police crackdown on nearly two hundred demonstrators gathered outside the seized police station in Yerevan’s Erebuni district.
Speaking to Avavot.am, Tosunyan said that at around 3:30 am on Thursday left the blocked street leading to the seized building and walked toward an adjacent avenue where he saw a police cordon and not far from it – law enforcement officers in civilian clothes throwing stones at about half a dozen demonstrators who were trying to escape the area.
“[The plainclothes police] first told me to turn off [my camera], which I did. I proceeded to walk further down the avenue, wanting to pass through the cordon. These people went after me and told me to erase [the footage I had shot]. I told them I wouldn’t,” the reporter recounted.
The men, “six or seven of them,” followed Tosunyan to a nearby bank, demanding that he erased the footage; moments later they threw the journalist to the ground and started to beat him up. “They mainly kicked me on my back. I managed somehow to get on my feet and get to the bank building. There was a man standing at the entrance, so asked him to let me in, explaining that the officers would seriously hurt me if I didn’t give them the memory card [of the camera]. Instead, he told me to give them the card and they’d let me go.
“I had dropped my camera when they threw me to the ground, so I turned around to see that one of the men had picked it up. I asked for the camera back, removed the memory card and gave it to them. They let me go, but they shouted behind me to never show up at rallies again or else they would beat me up again,” Tosunyan told, adding that he has reported the incident to the police. Nevertheless, the journalist said he did not expect the law enforcement agency to ever take any action against its officers.