Prosecution Overlooks Forensic Examination Results, Believes Defendant’s Injuries ‘Not Relevant’

Three employees of the Armenian Judicial Acts Compulsory Enforcement Service (JACES) claimed in court on October 14, that Yazidi defendant Yura Amaryan's allegations that they beat him and insulted his ethnic dignity are false. Note, Amaryan is accused of using violence against a JACES employee; however, the defendant denies the accusations claiming instead that JACES employees beat him and his mother, as well as used derogatory words towards Yazidi people. 

“If we were not beaten, why did an ambulance come and take us to the hospital,” Nazik Amaryan, the defendant's mother and a witness in the case, asked testifying in court on Wednesday. The woman said the investigator had cut out from the case materials essential parts of her preliminary testimony and only left the parts which do not contradict the trumped-up charges against the defendant. Her son, Amaryan added, was sent to a forensic medical examination only three weeks after the incident. 

Nazik Amaryan also told the backstory of the officials' visit and explained the cause of the dispute: “We've been living in that apartment, which we were given after losing our house in an earthquake, for 27 years. Last year we were told we had to move out and that we would be given 500 thousand drams ($1050). We asked them to give us a place [to live in]; what could we buy with that money? Well, they did not give us anything. We had already collected all our belongings by the time the officials from JACES came, and there was only firewood left. I approached them to ask whether we could come back for it the next day, but they started to yell and [they] pushed me. They pointed a gun at my son three times; the neighbors were scared to come close. [Officials] kicked him like he were a ball. Then an ambulance came; I don't know who called them.”

Witnesses Vardan Melikbekyan and Sanasar Yaralyan, when asked where the defendant and his mother received their injuries, claimed that Yura Amaryan hit his own mother from the back with a stone: “He was throwing stones at us, and one of them his his mother.”

In response to a question regarding the defendant's injuries, Yaralyan said: “I assume he got injured when I was trying to take away the rod he had picked up. There was a scuffle between us, but he could not have sustained severe injuries then.” 

Commenting on the Amaryans' allegations about plaintiff Karen Militonyan pointing a gun at the defendant,  his coworkers claimed Militonyan “only moved the gun from his left pocket to the right one.” 

“He has a right to carry a weapon and use it if needed,” Yaralyan added. 
 
Note, during the hearing Judge Levon Avetisyan inquired as to why public prosecutor Mkrtchyan failed to include in the case materials the results of Yuri Amaryan's forensic examination. The prosecutor replied that the defendant's injuries “are not relevant to the charges.”