Scandal in Armenian Prosecutor-General's Office: Cabinets bugged Media details resignation of prosecutors considering ex-presidents’ cases

The prosecutors involved in investigating the cases of Armenia's second and third presidents, Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan, resigned as a result of their conversations about Prosecutor-General Anna Vardapetyan, which included "strong" expressions directed at her.

Moreover, the prosecutors' offices were bugged, Caliber.Az reports, citing Zhokhovurd newspaper that quotes information from the Prosecutor-General’s Office.

"Time will tell how much these conversations correspond to reality, but since yesterday [June 6] they have been actively circulated in the [prosecutor's] system," the publication notes.

In response to the newspaper's request to comment on the situation, the Prosecutor General's Office dismissed such information.

It became known on June 6 that the abovementioned prosecutors submitted resignation letters. In particular, Deputy Prosecutor General Gevorg Baghdasaryan and Prosecutor Petros Petrosyan, who dealt with the case of Robert Kocharyan, as well as Prosecutor Arsen Martirosyan, who supervised the case of Serzh Sargsyan, resigned.

In 2019, Armenia’s ex-president Serzh Sargsyan was charged with plundering and embezzlement of state funds in the amount of 489 million drams [about $1 million] in the so-called “diesel case”. In January 2020, the preliminary investigation was completed, and the case was sent to court.

To recap, Azerbaijan put Kocharyan and Sargsyan on the wanted list accusing them of multiple crimes based on the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

They are charged with provoking national hatred and enmity toward Azerbaijanis in regular meetings with ethnic Armenians in the Khankendi city of Azerbaijan since 1988.

Both Kocharyan and Sargsyan personally attended the First Karabakh War in 1991-1994, which ended in the illegal occupation of 20 per cent of Azerbaijan's territories, mass killings of over 30,000, and forcible expulsion of around one million ethnic Azerbaijanis.

Kocharyan, who served as Armenia’s president from 1998 to 2008, actively engaged in the capture of the Azerbaijani city of Shusha in 1992 and was one of the masterminds of the brutal ethnic cleansing policy against the indigenous Azerbaijani population of the Karabakh region. In 1994-1996, he led the bogus separatist regime established in the occupied Azerbaijani lands.

Kocharyan’s successor Sargsyan, the third Armenian president in 2008-2018, was one of the commanders of the Armenian separatist forces next to Kocharyan in the First Karabakh War. He has actively led and coordinated the attacks on the Azerbaijani territories and civilians throughout the hostilities. In an interview with Thomas de Waal, a Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, in 2012, Serzh Sargsyan, admitted to committing brutalities against the civilian Azerbaijani population in the occupied territories, especially in the town of Khojaly.