Victim Side to Submit a Statement on Levon Torosyan’s Death Case to Prosecutor’s Office
On 6 May, 2018, term military serviceman Levon Torosyan was killed in the RA MoD Military Unit N21127. According to the official version, on 6 May, 2018, at approximately 7:25 a.m., in the territory of the military base of “Hakobasar” of the RA MoD Military Unit 21127, the body of Levon Torosyan, soldier at the same military unit, was found with a mortal penetrating gunshot wound in his head. The entrance of the wound was in the bottom of the chin and the exit was on the top of the head.
As it has already been mentioned, the expert of Peace Dialogue NGO, criminologist Ruben Martirosyan was involved in this case as a legal representative of the victim’s successor. After getting acquainted with the case materials, he has filed a statement on the crime to the Prosecutors Office. We are presenting the mentioned statement below.
“Approximately 10-15 minutes before the murder, Levon Torosyan made a phone call home from his peer serviceman’s mobile phone, and talked to his mother for four minutes, from 07:04 a.m. to 07:08 a.m. The beginning and the ending of the phone conversation was with his mother, Armenuhi Torosyan. Hearing her son yawn at the other end of the line, the mother asked Levon if he was asleep and had just woken up. Levon answered that he had been asleep and had decided to call early in the morning since it was his rest time and he would be able to “talk longer”. The conversation was mainly about Levon’s request to move him to another battalion. However, the conversation was abruptly interrupted. Suddenly Levon’s voice was heard from afar and was increasingly growing away saying “mom, mom!”. The mother said, “Levon jan, your voice is coming from afar”. According to Torosyan’s mother, his son wanted to say something at that moment but didn’t manage to. Some other incomprehensible sounds were heard after which the conversation was interrupted. Allegedly immediately after that unknown persons unexpectedly hit Levon Torosyan on the genital area with a blunt object (presumably with the machine gun butt) from left to right horizontally, which was proven by the expert conclusion N0604/12. This means that the soldier was subjected to violence and was killed in a matter of a few minutes. According to the testimony of witness Albert Bakhshyan, the latter heard the gunshot at approximately 07:20 a.m. most likely from the dugout or its vicinities, since at the moment, as already mentioned, Torosyan had just woken up and was having a rest. After the murder the body was moved in front of the first watchtower and was seated on a stump. The statement that the body had been moved is proven by the forensic examination of the corpse N0604/12 which revealed scratches in the articular area of the victim’s elbows caused by friction with blunt objects or surfaces and having a posthumous origin. Torosyan’s service Kalashnikov hand machine gun N X-6896 was moved to the false crime site with the butt leaning on the ground and the barrel touching the wound on the chin area, and the body was moved forward leaning on the machine gun barrel.
- Abazyan, the case investigator, who at that time was unaware of the phone conversation between the victim and his mother and that Levon had informed his mother that it was his rest time, took the soldiers to the Military Police and by exercising violence and threats, extorted false testimonies that the incident was a case of a suicide which happened in front of N1 military watchtower where Torosyan was allegedly carrying out his combat duty.
By means of this forgery, K. Abazyan and his superiors solve a number of problems:
- This allows to justify the fact that the machine gun was at the victim’s disposal (according to the hypothesis brought forth by the investigator, Torosyan was carrying out his combat duty).
- It allows to extort false testimonies from witnesses claiming that they haven’t seen the fact of the murder, since it happened in the 1st watchtower, whereas at the moment they were in the dugout or its vicinities. In reality, however, according to the expert conclusion on the ballistic analysis of swindles, all the soldiers were present at the crime scene at the moment of the crime.
- It also allows to “prove” that no special incident had preceded the murder in the “Hakobasar” Military Unit and that everything went in accordance with the rules of combat duty. In reality, as mentioned above, Torosyan was killed immediately after the phone conversation with his mother in the presence of his peer soldiers.
Subsequently identifying these circumstances, investigator Abazyan decided to hide the traces of the murder by any possible means. He decided to carry out a forensic technical-computer investigation, in which he particularly mentioned that “In the course of the preliminary investigation of the criminal case, the mobile phones of three soldiers assigned to duty in the “Hakobasar” Military Unit, namely, Garnik Avetisyan, Sevak Kartashyan, and Minas Militonyan have been taken by the RA Tavoush Region Military Police officers and had been submitted to the body conducting the proceedings”. Investigator Abazyan mentioned the models of all the three mobile phones without mentioning their sim numbers. In this way the investigator was trying to confuse the victim side, since the latter was not aware to whom particularly belonged the sim number 077876542, with which he usually kept in contact with his mother and talked three times during the mentioned duty period. The victim side managed to determine that the mentioned number belonged to Gevorg Hakobyan, a soldier in the same combat position. This means that there was also a fourth mobile phone, which was concealed by the investigator in a hope to never be revealed by the victim side. On 19 June, 2018, A. Barseghyan, the prosecutor supervising the criminal case, decided to satisfy the motion to provide copies of the expert conclusions and decisions made in the case, in the same time illegally denying the motion of the victim side regarding “providing the deciphering of the phone calls”, bringing the reasoning that the mentioned document is a preliminary investigative secret.
With his illegal decision A. Barseghyan wanted to limit the access of the victim’s parents to the documents for preventing them from noting the absence of the needed sim number among the three telephone numbers presented for examination. The supervising prosecutor did not take into consideration the fact that the document is also an expert conclusion which must be available after the investigator’s decision on assigning a forensic technical-computer examination. The investigator was bound to provide the copies of all the expert conclusions to the victim side.
Another obvious proof of a crime is the fact that according to the fingerprint examination conclusion N44951802, on the surface of the machine gun attached to Levon Torosyan no comparable fingerprints were revealed. As Abazyan had preliminarily informed the victim’s parents, such fingerprints cannot be identified for a simple reason: the machine gun does not have any flat surfaces where fingerprints could have been left. In reality, the fingerprints could have been destroyed by Abazyan himself, since the machine gun also contained the fingerprints of the person who carried it out of the dugout and put it next to the victim’s body; i.e. the fingerprints of the perpetrator.
The victim side also possesses another undeniable fact that initially on the first days of the preliminary investigation there were two suspects, the information on the one of whom disappeared from the case documents alongside the crime he had committed.
Attached below you can find the document proving L. Torosyan’s phone conversation with his mother immediately before the murder. The document has been legally obtained by the victim’s father from “Viva-Cell” Co.
Rising from the aforementioned, the victim side has filed a mediation to initiate a corresponding legal procedure on the basis of the statement and has ordered to assign the preparation of documents, the initiation of the criminal case, and the preliminary investigation to the Special Investigative Service of the RA Investigative Committee.
P.S. Besides the above listed facts included in the statement, the fact of forgery during the preliminary investigation is also proven by the following: according to the ballistic examination N44961803 (conclusion page 5), from the magazine of L. Torosyan’s machine gun 42 bullets have been found and 1 bullet was found from the barrel of the machine gun. The machine gun magazines possess 45 bullets: this fact comes to substantiate that there were two shots released from the mentioned machine gun instead of the one shot mentioned by the investigative body. According to the investigator and the experts, the machine gun was put on a single shot mode, consequently, L. Torosyan could not have released two shots. This means that the shots were released by the perpetrator who murdered Torosyan or the investigator Abazyan himself in order to create falsified material evidence. The same examination of the bulletproof vest has revealed two boxes with 90 and 88 bullets respectively in the pockets. This means that two of the bullets in one of the boxes were missing.
Posted 19 October, 2018
