Ten of the suspects are linked to billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia bloc widely regarded as Civil Contract’s number one election challenger. They included Mariam Sargsian, the 25-year-old head of Arbat, a village just south of Yerevan, and her parents.
Their relatives, friends and lawyers gathered outside the headquarters of the Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) in hopes of receiving information about their whereabouts. The ACC did not give any details of the criminal proceedings as of Wednesday evening.
It also did not allow the lawyers to visit the suspects and attend their interrogations. One of the lawyers, Tigran Hayrapetian, suggested that it is thus trying to extract confessions from the detainees in breach of Armenian law.
Hayrapetian represents dozens of Strong Armenia members and supporters who have been arrested in recent months on charges of giving or taking vote bribes. The ACC has opened 57 such criminal cases since February. The vast majority of them involve Karapetian’s loyalists. The law-enforcement agency reports their arrests on a virtually daily basis.
“Every day, 10-15 of our people get arrested,” Karapetian told a group of supporters at his Yerevan residence on Wednesday.
“Whenever they don’t arrest anyone, I worry that we did something wrong,” he added with sarcasm.
The 60-year-old tycoon himself is unable to physically attend Strong Armenia’s nationwide election campaign because of remaining under house arrest on separate charges rejected by him as politically motivated.
In a bid to back up its accusations, the ACC regularly releases audios of secretly recorded conversations in which suspects can be heard speaking about financial issues. Strong Armenia insists that they only discuss payment of salaries to individuals hired by the bloc for its election campaign. It strongly denies the vote-buying allegations.
The ACC also arrested on similar charges on Wednesday an unspecified number of members and supporters of another major opposition contender, the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), in the northern city of Vanadzor. BHK leader Gagik Tsarukian denounced the continuing “persecution” of his supporters as he campaigned in the Gegharkunik province.
The ruling party itself is accused by the opposition of trying to buy votes with public money as well as through a private charity run by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s wife, Anna Hakobian. None of its members or supporters have been prosecuted on corresponding charges.
Nor have the law-enforcement authorities launched formal investigations into reports that schoolchildren, teachers and other public sector employees are illegally ordered to attend Pashinian’s campaign rallies.