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On November 25, 2014, Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor submitted a letter to the RA Prosecutor General’s Office to the effect that Armen Shamiryan, convict at ‘Nubarashen’ penitentiary facilities had consulted the Organization and told about the illegal deal he had stricken with the administration of ‘Hrazdan’ penitentiary facilities while serving his sentence there. Accordingly, A. Shamiryan’s relatives brought into the penitentiary facilities a large number of mobile phones inside their parcel, and the administration of the facilities secured their unrestricted access. After selling out the mobile phones, the administration made sure that no searches were carried out in the cells until the buyers provided the payment. By prior arrangements, the profit was to be divided between A. Shamiryan and Deputy Chief of the penitentiary facilities in question; however, according to A. Shamiryan, he had been transferred from ‘Hrazdan’ penitentiary to ‘Nubarashen’ penitentiary before the profit was gained and was therefore deprived of his share.

On December 1, 2014, the RA Special Investigation Service initiated criminal proceedings on the above incident of abuse of power. As a result of the investigation, on December 25, 2015, a year after the initiation of the criminal proceedings, G. Begoyan, Senior Investigator at the RA SIS, decreed not to initiate criminal prosecution against the penitentiary officers for striking an illegal deal with A. Shamiryan through abusing their powers and threatening him through abusing their authorities, and against A. Shamiryan for engaging in illegal business activities, and slur and false testimony of his family members due to lack of corpus delicti in their actions and to discontinue the criminal proceedings.

On January 11, 2016, this decree was appealed by Armen Shamiryan and his attorney Tigran Safaryan by virtue of its groundlessness. Particularly, the complaint states that from the very outset the investigation did not aim to hold liable the offenders, since the investigator, with 2 sources of contradictory evidence, considered only the testimonies of the penitentiary officers, despite the fact that unlike them, A. Shamiryan and his family provided logical testimonies without any internal contradictions. The complaint also reads that the investigation forms the impression that the “only hope” of the Special Investigation Service was the honest confession of the penitentiary officers.

Also, the convicts involved in the deal above as buyers or witnesses, should have avoided telling the whole truth for safety reasons, since the persons allegedly responsible for the crime continued to work at the penitentiary facilities in question.

Hence, in their complaint to the RA Prosecutor General’s Office, Armen Shamiryan and his attorney Tigran Safaryan required to annul the decree of G. Begoyan, Investigator for High-Profile Cases at RA SIS, and refer the case to preliminary investigation assigning another investigator.

By the way, at the material time, the chief of ‘Hrazdan’ penitentiary facilities was T. Navasardyan, the present chief of ’Armavir’ penitentiary facilities.