Ten more opposition activists and supporters in a major community in northern Armenia were arrested on Friday ahead of a local election.
They all are reportedly affiliated or linked otherwise with billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance, the only opposition group running in the election slated for Sunday. Its top election candidate, Arsen Gevorgian, was arrested along with 13 of his supporters on Wednesday on charges of buying votes in the community comprising the town of Stepanavan and surrounding villages. Four of them were afterwards freed while the others, including Gevorgian, remanded in pretrial custody.
Strong Armenia rejects the accusations as politically motivated and says they are aimed at preventing its election victory. Its parliamentary leader, Narek Karapetian, drew parallels with mass arrests of the bloc’s members and supporters that preceded last June’s parliamentary elections.
“This is not news to us … We need to learn how to fight against this repressive system,” Karapetian told reporters in Stepanavan.
The Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC), a law-enforcement agency conducting the investigation, did not comment on the latest arrests in the following hours. The committee released on Wednesday a secretly recorded video meant to corroborate the accusations. It shows a man distributing cash inside a Strong Armenia campaign office and making notes in what the ACC described as voter lists lying on his desk.
The opposition bloc, which has the second largest group in the Armenian parliament, insists that he was paying staff and making other campaign expenditures, rather than handing out voter bribes.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party was narrowly defeated by Strong Armenia in Stepanavan in the parliamentary elections. The official nationwide results of those polls gave victory to Civil Contract. Strong Armenia and other opposition forces rejected them as fraudulent.