Epress.am News from Armenia
Two years have passed since cadet Haykaz Barseghyan died at the Vazgen Sargsyan military institute in Yerevan. On February 1, Epress.am reporters visited Barseghyan’s home in the village of Nizami in Armenia’s Ararat province and spoke with his parents about the circumstances surrounding the cadet’s death and the trial process that has been ongoing for 1.5 years.
Haykaz Barseghyan, a graduate of the military and sport college after Monte Melkonyan who had also served 8 months in a Hadrut military unit, was reluctant to continue his education at the Vazgen Sargsyan institute. He had initially applied to study at an air force academy in Voronezh; however, despite scoring high grades, his application was denied. Subsequently, his father, Arkady Barseghyan, found out that the son of a high-ranking official, who had actually gotten lower scores, had been sent to Voronezh instead of Haykaz.
“There’s nepotism everywhere, including military institutions,” the father complained. “He didn’t want to go to Vazgen Sargsyan from the very beginning; he’d say it was a mess. Whenever I’d try to reason with him, say that there were a lot of kids studying there successfully, he’d reply that I didn’t know anything,” he recalled and added; “Nevertheless, Haykaz never had any problems at the institute, he was a good student. I’d always urge him to work hard, but I didn’t know that he was already working as hard as he could.”
The father last saw Haykaz on January 7, 2015, when the cadet was going back to the institute after a break; “I didn’t have a habit of seeing him off, but that time I actually left the house with him and watched him as he walked to the stop and got on the bus. I noticed a weak smile on his face, and then he was gone.”
“I felt very distressed on the day of his death; I even remember that I woke up trembling that night,” Haykaz’s mother, Armine Mikayelyan said.
On January 29, the institute’s administration called the parents to the institute, saying that Haykaz had been in a fight; “[Deputy director] Tonoyan was asking me random questions: whether Haykaz was in a religious sect, whether he had a girlfriend… I said that we believed in God and were not members of any sects; that I was sure Haykaz did not have a girlfriend. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and told me to stay strong, ‘Haykaz was found hanged.’”
According to the mother, the institute administration had promised to ensure that a guard of honour was performed on the day of the funeral. The promise, however, was left unfulfilled, and one of the officers present at the funeral even went as far as to say to the parents; “It’s not like he has been killed on the border; why would there be an honor guard and volleys?”
In a statement released the next day after the incident, Armenia’s Investigative Committee said a criminal case had been opened into Barseghyan’s death under Article 104.2.7 of the RA Criminal Code (murder committed by a group of persons or an organized group). Later it reported that four students of the institute – Norik Sahakyan, Movses Azaryan, Vache Sahakyan and Gnel Tevosyan – had been arrested on suspicion of murdering Haykaz.
In parallel with the preliminary investigation, Lieutenant-General Martin Karapetyan resigned as the chief of the Vazgen Sargsyan institute, while then-defense minister Seyran Ohanyan announced that 30 other senior officials would also be dismissed. Nevertheless, for a long time the defense ministry glossed over the fact that one of the accused, Gnel Tevosyan, was the son of Colonel Zarmik Markosyan, the soon-to-be former deputy chief of the institute’s Armaments department.
According to Arkady Barseghyan, Markosyan was present during the entirety of the crime scene investigation; “But the investigators did not know that he was Gnel’s father. He was the one to show the investigators around the unit, and he was well aware of what had actually happened that day. [I’m convinced] that he had removed [the four defendants’] bloody clothes from the premises. How come there were no bloodstains on their clothes? How could have they cut my son’s veins and not have blood splattered all over them?”
Zarmik Markosyan, Barseghyan went on, was one of the first people to suggest that Haykaz had committed suicide. Markosyan allegedly claimed that Haykaz did not want to serve at the institute, and his father went there the previous November to persuade him to continue his education. Arkady Barseghyan, however, insisted that he had not gone to visit his son in November, and the “persuasion” had taken place the summer before, during the admission exams. “They deliberately moved this episode in time to insist on the suicide theory.”
When testifying at the trial, a number of the institute’s students said that the four defendants “had formed a gang and all the students tried to avoid contact with them.” They added that Gnel Tevosyan “enjoyed privileges” because of his father’s status at the institute. Arkady Barseghyan is convinced that his son might have still been alive today had the accused been timely punished for their past and repeated wrongdoings at the institute.
The next day after the death, one of the investigators told Arkady Barseghyan that it was evident from the position of the body that Haykaz could not have hung himself. After 10 months of a pre-trial investigation and 1,5 years of court proceedings, the father is confident that his son was brutally murdered.
On the eve of the incident, a group of cadets had a heated argument in the dining hall and subsequently took the fight outside, where the four defendants brutally beat Haykaz in a drunken state, Arkady Barseghayan said. That night, he added, the group attacked Haykaz while the latter was sleeping, strangled him to death and cut his veins. Then they took the body to the institute’s sports-ground and hanged it from a chin-up bar. In order to make it look like suicide, the group left a fake suicide note at the crime scene; “It’s no one’s fault; I’ve just grown too tired. Sorry for the mess.” A subsequent forensic handwriting analysis also revealed that the note had not been written by Haykaz.
The cadet’s parents have no complaints about the trial proceedings. Arkady Barseghyan said that he was only concerned about the attitude of Gnel Tevosyan’s lawyer, Ara Zarkaryan, who has been pushing the version of suicide throughout the entire process. “He is implying that my son was a weakling and only killed himself to get out of studying at the institute,” the disgruntled father noted, adding that they expected all four defendants to be sentenced to a life imprisonment.