By Karine Kalantarian
The 24-year-old son of a pro-government member of Armenia’s parliament has survived an apparent attempt on his life in a second high-profile shooting reported in Yerevan in less than a month, it emerged on Thursday.Police said Abraham Manukian was shot by an unknown gunman and hospitalized with serious wounds in the early hours of Wednesday.
A police statement said the young man and a friend of his came under fire as they left an expensive restaurant in the city center and were about to get in his car. It said law-enforcement authorities immediately launched a criminal investigation into the incident. No arrests have been reported so far.
Manukian’s wealthy father refused to speculate on who might have been behind the attack. Abraham Manukian, a parliament deputy from the governing Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), claimed that his son, who works for a big trading company, had “no enemies” and may have been mistaken for someone else by the gunman.
The shooting occurred just three weeks after the killing of a son of another prominent individual close to the government. Sedrak Zatikian, a 26-year-old senior member of the influential Yerkrapah Union of Nagorno-Karabakh war veterans, was shot dead in broad daylight as he drove through the city’s Malatia-Sebastia district. One of the stray bullets fired from a car that chased Zatikian’s expensive SUV for several minutes killed a 37-year-old woman who lived and worked nearby.
The dead man was primarily known as the older son of Vahan Zatikian, a prominent member of Yerkrapah who ran Malatia-Sebastia from 1996 until sudden death in 1999.