By Nate Ostiller and Arshaluys Barseghyan
Armenia’s Investigative Committee has launched an investigation over an alleged plot to assassinate Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The case, announced on Monday, May 18, came after a video was circulated online showing a group of masked and armed men directly addressing Pashinyan and saying, “we know where and when you are going […] you must answer for your every step.”
“Motivated by hatred and intolerance, and combined with hooligan motives during a live broadcast, they disseminated a video containing a threat that poses a real danger of committing murder against the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, related to his state and political activities and conditioned by his political views,” the Investigative Committee said.
An investigation on the grounds of an assassination plot, illegal trafficking of weapons, and computer sabotage has been opened, the committee said, the latter being due to the fact the suspects “accessed restricted computer network data to share the video during a live broadcast.”
In the video, along with the threats, a masked man blamed Pashinyan for the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and repeatedly called him a liar. The man also alleged that Pashinyan wants to “hand over Armenia to Azerbaijan,” and said Armenians should not vote for him in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
The unknown individual was speaking in a Nagorno-Karabakh dialect, and the flag of Nagorno-Karabakh was present throughout the video on the wall behind him.
