A court in Armenia has arrested former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Lieutenant General Tiran Khachatryan, who mocked the country's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in 2021, the detainee's lawyers Varazdat Harutyunyan and Armen Andrikyan announced.
On Saturday, Khachatryan's defense announced that he was accused of "official negligence during wartime", but the general pleaded not guilty.
„As expected, without giving enough time to review the 1,200-page case, Judge Masis Melkonyan ignored the lack of reasonable suspicion and grounds and "has granted the investigator's request to arrest Lieutenant General Tiran Khachatryan for two months," the statement posted on Facebook said.
It also states that the groundlessness of the charges against Khachatryan and the lack of grounds for his arrest were fully confirmed at the court hearing, which lasted about five hours.
The lawyers stated that this is one of the rare cases of the detention of a person accused of committing a crime of medium gravity, and the abstract possibility of obstructing the investigation is refuted by Khachatryan's behavior during the four-year investigation.
The defense notes that the statute of limitations for this criminal case is approaching and their client is not threatened with imprisonment. Lawyers believe that a differentiated approach was applied to Khachatryan, he was arrested not to ensure the progress of the four-year investigation, but as a punishment for his active political and civic position, as well as to “point out the culprit“ for the defeat in the war.
Khachatryan will serve his arrest in the Vardashen pre-trial detention center.
He was dismissed from the post of First Deputy Chief of the General Staff in February 2021 after ridiculing Pashinyan's words about the “Iskander“ systems. Then Pashinyan spoke of “unexploded” or “exploded by ten percent“ missiles of the “Iskander” operational-tactical complex during the escalation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the fall of 2020.
This was his response to former President Serzh Sargsyan's statement that the Armenian military could have used the "Iskander" at the very beginning of the hostilities. After Khachatryan's dismissal, dozens of high-ranking Armenian military officers demanded Pashinyan's resignation.