Armenia’s Investigative Committee has launched an investigation over an alleged plot to assassinate Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The case, announced on Monday, 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.
Shortly after, Pashinyan responded with his own set of insults and allegations, calling the men ‘scum’ and ‘scoundrels’ and claiming they were from Nagorno-Karabakh but had ‘ran away’.
‘They have put on masks, as if they are strong men. But do you know why they are wearing masks? Because once they take them off, we will see that these are the ones who abandoned our soldiers and ran away, filled with fear’, Pashinyan said with visible anger.
‘You ran away at Ferrari speed — who are you to speak?’, he added, apparently suggesting that they were former soldiers who had fled during Azerbaijan’s final offensive in the region in 2023.
He vowed to find them ‘one by one’ and urged them to voluntarily show up.
Daniel Ioannisyan from the Union of Informed Citizens organisation, claimed it was ‘a clear example of a Russian false-flag operation’. He described it as a ‘classic Russian’ action to frame Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, along with other efforts to create tensions and foster internal divisions.
In contrast, human rights activist and opposition figure Nina Karapetyants claimed the possibility the entire plot could have been fabricated by Armenian authorities should not be excluded. She did not provide evidence to support her allegations.
Nate Ostiller
