Epress.am News from Armenia
“I’ve always been the soldier of my people, and I am going to continue to serve my nation,” said Sasun Mikaelyan who was released just moments ago from the Hospital for Detainees of the RA Ministry of Justice in Yerevan.
Asked about his next steps, Mikaelyan said in all issues, he will side with the position of the Armenian National Congress (HAK) and will do that which HAK considers to be right.
As for talk about his betraying Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Mikaelyan said Sargsyan was his friend in battle and “I haven’t betrayed him; it’s just that we have our different political viewpoints.”
Mikaelyan will now go to Yerablur military cemetery and then to his home in Hrazdan.
Note, Mikaelyan, a former National Assembly deputy, is widely regarded as a Karabakh war hero. According to the website Wives of Armenia’s Political Prisoners, Mikaelyan “was arrested on March 12, 2008. He was a defendant in the Case of Seven, charged with violating Articles 225 (mass disorder) and 235 (illegal weapons possession), [and] sentenced to eight years in prison… After more than a year and a half in the Kentron Penitentiary of the National Security Service (former KGB), he was transferred to the prison hospital, and then to a civilian hospital where he underwent surgery in mid-December.”
Members of the opposition consider him, as well as Nikol Pashinyan and a handful of others, to be political prisoners. Their release is anticipated under a general amnesty approved by parliament yesterday.