October 10, 2006

Heritage Statement on Armenian ‘Watergate’

On October 9, Raffi Hovannisian and the Heritage Party sent a complaint to the Republic’s prosecutor general Aghvan Hovsepyan, appealing the recent decision of the Yerevan prosecutor’s office not to file criminal charges in the case of the illegal forcible closure of and break-in to their offices and computer system in March.  The prosecutor general personally pledged to Hovannisian to consider the case and respond by week’s end.

As a reminder, an official laboratory examination ordered by the Yerevan police department had concluded months ago that on March 8 individuals yet to be identified entered the premises in question, from which Hovannisian and Heritage had unlawfully been evicted days earlier, and after circumventing the computer’s password “at 1:06am a monitor and a USB-type memory-bearing flashcard of an unknown brand were externally connected to the computer, the operational system of which registered modifications to a host of files.”

This alone is clearly sufficient to meet the threshold requirement for initiating a criminal case, after which all witnesses and suspects, regardless of their official capacity, must be questioned and a series of other relevant investigations carried out.

Anything short of this means an orchestrated cover-up of a criminal act well beyond the bounds of justice.

We demand truth and right.

October 10, 2006
Yerevan