Radio Azatutyun. Law-enforcement authorities in Georgia have extradited to Armenia a man accused of providing a sophisticated weapon to Samvel Babayan, the jailed army general linked to an Armenian opposition group, it emerged on Wednesday.
The 40-year-old Armenian national, Robert Aghvanian, was detained in Tbilisi in late March just days after Babayan’s controversial arrest.
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) said at the time that the former commander of Nagorno-Karabakh’s army paid two other arrested suspects to smuggle a shoulder-fired surface-to-air rocket from or through Georgia. It claimed to have found and confiscated the Russian-made Igla system in Karabakh.
Subsequent NSS statements were more ambiguous about the origin of the weapon. Investigators said only that Aghvanian delivered the weapon in return for $38,000 that was promised by Sanasar Gabrielian, a longtime Babayan associate. Gabrielian allegedly acted on the general’s orders.
Babayan repeatedly denied the accusations as baseless before being sentenced to six years in prison by a Yerevan court late last month. Gabrielian, who received a three-year prison sentence, insisted at their trial that it was he, not Babayan, who commissioned the confiscated Igla.
The two men were arrested about two weeks before Armenia’s last parliamentary elections. Babayan was unofficially affiliated with the ORO alliance led by former Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian and two other opposition politicians. ORO condemned the criminal case as politically motivated. The opposition bloc failed to win any parliament seats.
Photo – Radio Azatutyun