Epress.am News from Armenia
An 18-year-old boy who had been taking part in a sit-in organized by a group led by veteran and former political prisoner Volodya Avetisyan at Yerevan’s Freedom Square was on March 22 forcibly removed from the area by two men in civilian clothes and taken to the Aparan police division. The boy, Artur Margaryan, has since been released and agreed today to talk about the details of the incident with Epress.am.
The group have organized the sit-in to protest against the verdicts recently handed down to Karabakh war veteran and opposition leader Zhirayr Sefilyan and the other defendants in the case. 18-year-old Margaryan joined the protest after receiving his parents’ consent.
Nevertheless, officers of the Aparan police division on Thursday invited Margaryan’s mother to the station and made her file a missing person report for her son.
“They told my mom that the sixth division [of Armenia’s police] would come for me if she did not file a report. They scared and pressured her into writing it. They they took my mom to Yerevan and told her to call me and say she wanted to go somewhere with me. They just wanted to get me out of the Opera area so that they could detain me. In other words – I had been missing, my parents filed a report and the police found me,” the young man said.
After Margaryan and his mother had left the Freedom Square, two men in plainclothes approached them and said they had to go with them: “I tried immediately to phone my lawyer, but they pushed me inside a civilian car and drove me to Aparan. They were forced to let me go though because people had already started talking.”
On the way to Aparan, Margaryan added, he tried to explain to the men that he had a right to call a lawyer and that they were violating the law: “‘Let’s forget the law,’ they replied, ‘Let’s talk as friends. You’ve been doing wrong things.’” The young man further told us that he intended to continue to fight despite everything and that he had already returned to the Freedom Square.