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As already known the Police apprehended activist Mihran Melkonyan from the area adjacent to the Municipality yesterday. The Police revealed that the apprehended person had been in prison and on December 27, 2012 the Aragatsotn Region Court of Common Jurisdiction adopted a ruling of early conditional release in relation to him.

Melkonyan undertook a commitment to attend the alternative punishment institution once per six months. However, as Artur Sakunts, who visited Melkonyan as a human rights defender reports GALLA, even his mother hasn’t seen him since April 4, 2013. The latter didn’t know her son’s location and he didn’t either attend before the alternative punishment institution.

Yesterday the Lori Region Court of Common Jurisdiction took a decision in relation to Mihran Melkonyan, whereby, he will serve the remaining 6-months of his sentence.

Artur Sakunts notes that if he didn’t go to the Police, which he should have done, it means he violated an order, and it is natural that he would be declared wanted by the Police. However, the human rights defender finds that questions should still be posed to the Police: first of all, since when have the Police declared him wanted? And secondly, when wanted is declared, all of the RA Police departments should be notified about the wanted person’s data, hence, it should be  clarified whether or not all of the departments were notified about Melkonyan’s data. Thirdly, if the data of the wanted person were disseminated and the decision on search was made, thus, each police officer should have been notified about it.

In this case how come Melkonyan dealt with the Police several times during the sit-in, but nobody realized he was a wanted person?

Thus, I can assume that the Police are either illiterate or are lying, that is, the Police declared wanted and the decision regarding it was made in a late term, it means the alternative punishment institution failed in its work or if the latter didn’t fail, then the Police didn’t declare wanted in the right time, or if the Police declared wanted in the right time, then all of the Police departments were not notified about the decision in the right time.

And if they were notified, then perhaps the recommendation wasn’t given to the police officials”, notes Mr. Sakunts and doesn’t exclude that the Police intentionally allowed Mihran Melkonyan to continue remaining in the sit-in action participant list, so that they well use the wanted “card” against the activists at their time of convenience.