A former Armenian deputy prosecutor-general who broke ranks to publicly voice
support for opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosian went on trial Monday on what
he considers politically motivated charges that have been twice changed by
prosecutors.

Gagik Jahangirian was sacked and arrested on February 23, the day after delivering a fiery speech at an opposition rally in which he accused the
Armenian authorities of falsifying the February 19 presidential election and
described Ter-Petrosian as its rightful winner.

Jahangirian was ambushed and taken away by a special police unit along with his disabled brother Vartan and two other men as they left Yerevan in a car. Police
said the four men were armed and planned to “destabilize the situation in the
capital.” Vartan Jahangirian was shot and wounded during the operation and is
now being tried separately.

The once powerful ex-prosecutor was initially accused of illegal arms
possession, a charge that was subsequently dropped and changed to an attempt to
“usurp state power.” Last month he was cleared of the coup charge as well only
to be accused under another article of the Armenian Criminal Code dealing with
assaults on “representatives of the state authority.”

Prosecutors say Jahangirian and his brother, who was set free pending trial in
May, put up resistance and injured two policemen during the arrest. Both
defendants have rejected the accusations, saying that they were “fabricated” in
retaliation for Gagik Jahangirian’s February 23 speech in Yerevan’s Liberty
Square.

In that speech, Jahangirian also joined Ter-Petrosian in implicating then
outgoing President Robert Kocharian and his incoming successor, Serzh Sarkisian,
in the deadly October 1999 attack on the Armenian parliament. Jahangirian
accused the two men of obstructing the criminal investigation into the
parliament shootings which he himself had led until 2002.

“Don’t you know Jahangirian?” the ex-prosecutor declared at the start of his
trial. “Can Jahangirian shove or insult any policeman?” “I should have been
sitting on the victims’ bench, Mr. Vartanian,” he said, appealing to the
presiding judge.

Jahangirian again denounced his arrest as illegal and claimed to have been
tortured in police custody. Incidentally, he himself faced accusations of
torture and other human rights abuses during his part tenure as Armenia’s chief
military prosecutor

The first court session in the high-profile trial was nearly disrupted by an
angry verbal exchange between opposition supporters who packed the courtroom and
one of the police officers allegedly injured by the Jahangirians. The policeman,
Arman Harutiunian, was taken away from the courtroom after swearing at women who
apparently insulted him.

Jahangirian’s defense lawyer, Lusine Sahakian, alleged more than a dozen
violations of due process in the prosecutors’ handling of the case. She also
said that that the judge, Zhora Vartanian, can not preside over the trial
because his son is involved in the ongoing criminal investigation into the
Armenian opposition’s election-related activities that has been accompanied by
mass arrests of opposition members. Vartanian refused to abandon the case,
however.

While in jail, Jahangirian disputed the legality of a Kocharian decree that
relieved him of his duties and stripped him of his rank of First-Class State
Justice Counsel. In a lawsuit filed to Armenia’s Administrative Court, he
claimed that his sacking did not follow the procedure stipulated by an Armenian
law regulating the work of state prosecutors. He also argued that Article 58 of
Armenia’s constitution gives the president of the republic only the right to
award such titles to senior law-enforcement and judicial officials and says
nothing about their revocation.

The court dismissed the suit on August 1, citing another clause in the law that
bans prosecutors from joining political parties and engaging in other political
activities. The court also ruled that the constitution does allow the president
to revoke ranks given to state officials. It claimed that “in this case the term
‘to award’ carries a prerogative to both give and revoke a title.”

By Karine Kalantarian