An international human rights organization has joined its Armenian counterparts
in demanding a “thorough and independent” inquiry into last week’s death in
police custody of a young man widely regarded as the latest victim of police
brutality in Armenia.

Levon Gulian died on Saturday while being questioned at the Armenian police
headquarters as a presumed witness of a deadly shooting that took place outside
his Yerevan restaurant earlier last week. The police claimed that during the
interrogation he tried to escape through a window but slipped and fell to his
death from the second floor of the police building.

Gulian’s family vehemently rejected this theory, saying that the 30-year-old
father of two was tortured to death by police investigators. Family members say
his body carries numerous traces of violence and will not be buried until it is
examined by independent forensic experts. More than a dozen of them, joined by
Armenian human rights and other civic activists, demonstrated outside the
national Police Service on Tuesday.

“We will go to the end,” said Gulian’s sister Armine. “We will do everything to
have the guilty punished.”

“I suspect that Levon’s death was caused by torture. Let the police prove the
opposite,” Artak Kirakosian of the Civil Society Institute, told an ensued news
conference.

Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for
Human Rights (IHF), described these suspicions as “legitimate” in a letter to
Lieutenant-General Hayk Harutiunian, chief of the Police Service, sent on
Thursday. Rhodes cited a “past record of suspicious cases of death in police
custody in Armenia and the fact that torture and ill-treatment by the police
remain serious problems.” He urged Harutiunian to “ensure that all the
circumstances leading to [Gulian’s] death be investigated thoroughly and
independently.”

The outcry already forced Harutiunian to order earlier this week an internal
police inquiry into the extraordinary incident, which is also being investigated
by Armenian prosecutors. The Office of the Prosecutor-General launched a
criminal case under an article of the Armenian Criminal Code that deals with
cases where individuals are forced to commit suicide.

The dead man’s relatives fear this is a sign that the prosecutors will clear the
police of any wrongdoing. They wrote to Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian on
Tuesday, asking him to prevent what they see as a high-level cover-up.

Sarkisian assured reporters on Wednesday that he took the relatives’ concerns
seriously. “Once the [police] inquiry is over, relevant bodies will provide
information to the public,” he said.

Gulian was the owner of a restaurant in Yerevan’s southern Shengavit district
near which a man was shot dead on May 9 in a reported dispute between two groups
of unknown individuals. Gulian was detained and questioned for two days at
Shengavit’s police department. He was set free only to be again arrested by the
Police Service’s Directorate General of Criminal Investigations. Family members
say Gulian told them that he was badly mistreated by the Shengavit police before
being driven to his last interrogation by Hovik Tamamian, deputy chief of the
feared police unit.

Tamamian is known as a figure close to President Robert Kocharian who played a
major role in a 2004 government crackdown on the Armenian opposition. He was
sacked as chief of central Yerevan’s police department and given his current
post last year, reportedly under pressure from the police leadership.

Sayad Shirinian, the chief police spokesman, chided the press on Wednesday for
“speculating” about Tamamian’s possible involvement in the man’s death. “If it
is established that Hovik Tamamian was involved, all of us will condemn him,” he
said.

According to local and Western watchdogs, torture and mistreatment in custody
are the most common form of human rights violations in Armenia. The practice
seems to have continued unabated since the Armenian parliament’s ratification in
2002 of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and the European
Convention on Human Rights.

By Ruzanna Stepanian and Emil Danielyan