The Office of the Prosecutor-General declined to reveal the charges on Tuesday. It said that as part of the same criminal case it also asked the CEC to allow the indictment and arrest of two other men who ran in the June 7 parliamentary elections on the ticket of Kocharian’s Hayastan alliance.
The CEC permission is necessary because the three oppositionists technically remain election candidates. It was not immediately clear when the commission dominated by government loyalists will discuss the prosecutors’ petitions. It has already allowed law-enforcement authorities to prosecute several other opposition candidates.
On Sunday, Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) did not allow Kocharian to leave the country as he was about to board a flight to Russia. The NSS and the prosecutors have still not given a reason for the travel condemned by Kocharian’s office as illegal.
Kocharian is already standing trial for his role in a 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan. The judge presiding over the trial has not banned him from traveling abroad. Kocharian’s spokesman Bagrat Mikoyan, said that the 71-year-old ex-president does not yet know any details of more charges “fabricated” against him.
The prosecutors are not seeking an arrest warrant for Kocharian yet. As he wrapped up his election campaign in Yerevan on June 5, Pashinian announced that Kocharian will be arrested again “right after the elections.”
On the campaign trail, the Armenian premier has also vowed to jail Samvel Karapetian and Gagik Tsarukian, wealthy businessmen leading the two other major opposition groups that challenged the ruling Civil Contract party in the elections. Amid growing opposition allegations of electoral fraud, Pashinian also reaffirmed late last week his pledges to “dispossess” the three top opposition leaders.
“Bread must taste like candy to them so that it doesn’t occur to them to hand out vote bribes anymore,” he said. “This is our political agenda, and in this sense our revolution cannot be a velvet one anymore.”
Critics say such statements only prove that law-enforcement authorities are acting on Pashinian’s illegal orders. Scores of opposition members and supporters have been arrested during the parliamentary race.