YEREVAN (RFE/RL)—An army general and two other senior Armenian Defense Ministry officials have been arrested in separate corruption investigations conducted by law-enforcement authorities on May 31.
The general, Melsik Chilingarian, was taken into custody late on May 30, ten days after being sacked as head of the ministry’s Department on Armaments which deals with storage, maintenance and repair of weapons and ammunition supplied to the Armenian Armed Forces.
Also arrested was Colonel Armen Markarian, one of Chilingarian’s subordinates who was in charge of vehicles used by the army. Markarian was fired earlier in May.
Armenia’s Investigative Committee said the two men are suspected of abuse of power that resulted in “severe consequences.”
The third suspect, Colonel Mher Papian, holds a senior position in the Defense Ministry’s Department on Material-Technical Procurements tasked with arms procurements. He was detained as part of a separate inquiry conducted by the Investigative Committee. The law-enforcement agency said Papian risks prosecution on charges of “negligent attitude towards military service” which also had “severe consequences.”
A spokeswoman for the committee said that investigators will specifically look into the quality of various items which the arrested officials provided to the Armed Forces and determine whether they were purchased at inflated prices. She did not go into details.
Incidentally, President Serge Sarkisian dismissed Papian’s immediate superior, Deputy Defense Minister Alik Mirzabekian, as well as General Arshak Karapetian, the military intelligence chief, and General Komitas Muradian, the commander of the Armenian army’s communication units, in late April.
The sackings came more than three weeks after the outbreak of heavy fighting around Nagorno-Karabagh that nearly escalated into a full-scale Armenian-Azerbaijani war. A senior pro-government lawmaker attributed them to “shortcomings” in the Armenian military’s response to an Azerbaijani offensive in Karabagh.
The Investigative Committee declined to clarify whether Monday’s arrests are also connected with the April 2 offensive that left more than 80 Armenian soldiers and volunteers dead.
Azerbaijani troops captured several Armenian positions along the Karabagh “line of contact” but failed to advance farther. According to independent sources in Baku, at least 94 Azerbaijani soldiers, many of them members of Special Forces, died in action.
The four-day hostilities raised questions about the Armenian military’s apparent lack of prior knowledge of the assault. Critics also suggested that Karabagh Armenian frontline troops did not have sufficient modern weapons and other military equipment when they came under attack.
Sarkisian and other Armenian officials have insisted that the Azerbaijani offensive failed because it was aimed at achieving significant territorial gains that would have led to a “military solution” to the Karabagh conflict.”
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It is hard to believe that Armenian military intelligence was not aware of major enemy buildup along the whole LoC. The officials responsible for military intelligence should be severely punished since they caused so many unnecessary loss of our brave soldiers.
Chief of staff of the armed forces Khachaturov was reportedly playing billiard when he was made aware of the stationing of enemy troops and their movements along the LoC, but ignored the warning. Dozens of young Armenian lives were lost…
I think it was a mistake for Serjh Sargsyan to suggest that the 7 square km invasion and now illegal occupation by Azer-terrorist forces was “not significant”. Understandable, Armenia could not afford to risk lives for small plots of land and thus it was let go. But now it is being used against him. Indeed there should be no such thing as Armenian lands which are “not significant”. Now in order to mitigate this damage, the NKR should actually be a party to the negotiations, and most importantly, demand the withdrawal of the rest of Azeri terrorist forces not just from the 7km but from the rest of historic Artsakh.