Suren Torosian, who is in charge of utility services in Aragatsavan, a large village 80 kilometers northwest of Yerevan, sparked an angry demonstration there on June 7 after allegedly spraying a local man with tear gas and repeatedly hitting him with a stick during an argument. Armen Sahakian, the 24-year-old man, suffered a head injury and received urgent treatment in hospital.
Dozens of other Aragatsavan residents blocked a highway leading to Yerevan to demand Torosian’s arrest and prosecution. They were especially furious with the fact that Sahakian was assaulted despite suffering from serious chronic diseases.
“Is this the rule of law created by Civil Contract?” one of the protesters told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Torosian was promptly detained and charged with assault only to be set free hours later. Armenia’s Investigative Committee said the assault charge leveled against him is not serious enough to warrant his pre-trial arrest.
The incident drew media attention to the content of Torosian’s Facebook page and, in particular, an angry video message posted by the official there this month. In that message, the ruling party member lashes out at Pashinian’s vocal critics, saying that he “will have their ears cut off” and “kick them in the face.”
“If we force a couple of such types to lie down and drag them along the ground, everything will get fixed … I will shoot them in the forehead,” he says.
Torosian, who got his current job after the 2018 “velvet revolution” that brought Pashinian to power, goes on to urge the heads of regional divisions of Armenia’s police and National Security Service to “drag” the prime minister’s detractors out of their homes.
A spokesman for the Investigative Committee said on Monday the law-enforcement agency has not opened a criminal case in connection with the death threats because it has not received a formal “crime report.”
For its part, the Office of the Prosecutor-General told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that it will comment on legal consequences of the threats only in response to a written inquiry.
Civil Contract has still not reacted to its member’s public calls for violence.
The governor of Aragatsotn province encompassing Aragatsavan, who is also affiliated with Pashinian’s party, on Monday criticized those calls and pledged to initiate a “discussion” of Torosian’s conduct. “His words weren’t normal, in my view,” said Sergei Movsisian.
Torosian also revealed in the same scandalous video that he recently gave a ride to an 8-year-old boy who turned out to be a refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh. He said he stopped his car on a highway outside Aragatsavan and ordered the boy to “get out” after the latter said that his family fled Karabakh because “traitor Nikol gave away our lands.”
Torosian then pledged to “deal with” the boy’s parents working in the public sector of another rural community. “We will throw such people out of the sector,” he said.