Epress.am News from Armenia
A Yerevan district court handed down a sentence of 4 years to former head of the RA Police General Department of Criminal Intelligence Hovhannes Tamamyan under charges of RA Criminal Code Article 308 Section1 (“a state official abusing his authority, using his official position contrary to the interests of the service”) and 2 (“abuse of official authority which negligently caused grave consequences”).
The other two men accused in the case, police officers Armen Poghosyan and Vahan Khanzadyan, were charged only with Section 2 of the same article and were sentenced to two years in prison each.
Note, all three men admitted their guilt and the case was examined in an accelerated trial, and they couldn’t have been assigned stricter punishments than two-thirds of the strictest punishment defined in the RA Criminal Code article(s) for which they were charged. In Tamamyan’s case, the charges are punishable by imprisonment for up to 6 years; therefore, the prosecutor asked for the maximum punishment — 4 years, which was sustained by the court.
Tamamyan’s attorney, Vaghinak Gevorgyan, deemed the ruling unjust, adding that the defense has not yet decided whether it will appeal or not. He will make the decision public after meeting with his client.
Recall, Tamamyan was arrested late March 2011 on on charges of abuse of power and has since been kept under arrest pending trial. He is accused of deliberately mishandling a police investigation into the May 12, 2010 murder of 23-year-old Khachik Mkrtchyan. As reported by RFE/RL’s Armenian service, prosecutors say police investigators overseen by Tamamyan deliberately failed to prosecute the murder perpetrator and charged another individual instead, presumably in return for a massive kickback. Tamamyan is also charged on similar accounts in another case, in which he failed to prosecute Aram and Arthur Martirosyans for the attempted murder of Hakob and Hovsep Hovhannisyans and Spartak Zargaradoghyan in Nov. 2009 in Gavar.