Armenia’s security service director confirms: Talk with investigation service chief was wiretapped

September 11, 2018 By administrator

Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) Director Artur Vanetsyan has confirmed that he and Special Investigation Service (SIS) Chief Sasun Khachatryan are the ones speaking in the voice recording that was posted on the internet on Tuesday.

At a press conference after the posting of this recording, Vanetsyan said it is bizarre that a conversation between the NSS director and the SIS chief was wiretapped.

“That’s an alarming fact, in connection with which there will be a thorough investigation,” he added, in particular. “The conversation had taken place on the day of the court making the well-known ruling on [second President] Robert Kocharyan [in connection with the criminal case into what had occurred in capital city Yerevan, in March 2008].

“Taking into account the fact that the second President of the Republic of Armenia and CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov were standing trial, it was necessary to be 100 percent sure that there is no shortcoming and drawback on that matter. Such a discussion has taken place between me and Mr. Khachatryan, and it was a purely legal discussion.”

Vanetsyan explained that he had received an expert opinion in which there was a matter of clarification in connection with the grounds.

“We will continue the fight that we have begun, and nothing will obstruct us,” he added. “The money looted from Armenia will be returned, murderers will stand trial, and we will continue that process.”

Bulgarian chief banker son of Genocide survivors

November 27, 2017 By administrator

Bulgarian Association of Banks has an ethnic Armenian director who turns out to be a descendent of Genocide survivors.

Levon Hambardzumyan was born in 1953 to Armenian parents who had settled Bulgaria after escaping the massacres.

Hambardzumyan saw a peak in his career after the USSR’s collapse, becoming a champion in the counselling and auditing services. In 1997, he was elected as the Canada’s honorary consul in Sofia. In 2000, Hambardzumyan served as a deputy minister of economy; later the same year, he was appointed the executive director of an agency responsible for privatization affairs.

Hambardzumyan has been holding his current post since 2001. Also the same year, he became the chief executive of the UniCredit Bulbank.

In 2005, Finance Central Europe named him the Best Banker of the Year. Two years later, in 2007, he was named the Best Manager by the publication Manager of the Year. In 2008, Hambardzumyan was honored with the title Commendatore by then President of Italy Giorgio Napolitano.

Turkish prosecutors seek prison terms for Amnesty Turkey chief, 10 other activists

October 9, 2017 By administrator

Nearly a dozen prominent rights activists in Turkey, including two foreign nationals, are facing up to 15 years in prison over charges of membership in terror groups and aiding them some three months after they were detained in Istanbul.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Sunday that Public Prosecutor’s Office in Istanbul had completed its investigation into nine Turkish activists, including Taner Kilic, Amnesty International’s Turkey chief, and German Peter Steudtner along with Swede Ali Gharavi.

The suspects were detained at a workshop, organized by Amnesty, on digital security at a hotel in Buyukada of Istanbul’s Princes’ Islands on July 5 on charges of taking “membership in an armed terrorist organization” and “aiding an armed terrorist organization” in the meeting.

In a 17-page indictment, which was approved by Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Irfan Fidan, prosecutors sought prison terms from seven-and-a-half to 15 years. The indictment was later sent to the Istanbul Heavy Penal Court.

The indictment charged Kilic with armed terror group membership, whereas the rest of the suspects were charged with aiding an armed terror group.

According to the indictment, the suspects allegedly tried to incite violent and chaotic mass public protest rallies when Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, held “Justice” march between June 15 and July 15.

Kilicdaroglu and his fellow party members marched from the capital Ankara to Istanbul, calling for justice for people jailed for their purported connections to a number of terror groups, particularly the Fethullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), led by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Ankara accuses Gulen of being the mastermind of last year’s mid-July failed coup in the country. The 76-year-old cleric has since strongly rejected the government’s allegations, but Ankara labeled his movement as FETO and designated it as a terrorist organization.

Amnesty, while denouncing the detention of the activists, describes Gharavi as an IT strategy consultant and Steudtner as a “non-violence and well-being trainer.”

The jailing of the 11 activists, including Amnesty’s director in Turkey, Idil Eser, has already sounded international alarm and amplified fears of waning freedom of speech under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Prosecutors charged Kilic with FETO membership, whereas the rest were accused of helping an armed terror group, including FETO.

Since the botched putsch, Ankara has unleashed a massive crackdown across the country, suspending or dismissing more than 150,000 judges, policemen, teachers, and civil servants and arresting nearly 50,000 others.

Many rights groups, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, have slammed Ankara’s heavy clampdown on perceived putschists.

Chief of Yerevan Police relieved of his duties

August 8, 2016 By administrator

yerevan police-head YEREVAN. – Chief of Yerevan Police, Lieutenant General Ashot Karapetyan was relieved of his duties on Monday. Karapetyan was sacked upon the order of the Armenian Chief of Police Vladimir Gasparyan, the police press-service reports.

As a result of the internal investigation in the Armenian police on occasion of the incidents in Yerevan’s Khorenatsi street and Sari Tagh district, a number of its workers, including Ashot Karapetyan, were fined. Karapetyan had also received a strict warning.

U.S. Army Chief In Europe Visits Armenia

May 23, 2016 By administrator

Armenia – U.S. Army Europe commander Ben Hodges (C) at a meeting with Armenian Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian in Yerevan, 23May2016.

(azatutyun.am) The commander of the U.S. Army Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, discussed Armenia’s growing military ties with the United States and the recent escalation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict during a visit to Yerevan on Monday.

According to the Armenian Defense Ministry, Hodges and Major General Lee Tafanelli, the Kansas National Guard chief accompanying him, expressed concern at last month’s heavy fighting in Karabakh when they met with Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian.

Ohanian was reported to brief them on the current situation in the conflict zone. The United States has been trying to defuse tensions there together with Russia and France, the two other world powers mediating Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.

Ohanian and Hodges agreed to step up cooperation between Armenia’s Armed Forces and the U.S. Army Europe, a Defense Ministry statement said. It listed multinational peacekeeping operations among the areas of closer bilateral ties.

Ohanian was reported to point to U.S. training of Armenian military personnel and increased Armenian participation in NATO’s military exercises. Hodges praised a 32-strong unit of Armenian military medics which took part in U.S.-led exercises held in Germany last month.

During the three-week drills codenamed Sabre Junction, they simulated evacuation and treatment of wounded military personnel at a mobile field hospital that was deployed by them outside Armenia for the first time ever. The U.S. military donated the hospital to an Armenian peacekeeping brigade in 2007.

The Armenian government expressed readiness last year to commit the hospital as well sappers trained to detect and defuse improvised explosive devices (IEDs) planted by “terrorist groups” for and multinational peacekeeping operations. Armenian army medics and demining experts will undergo additional training, presumably by U.S. and other NATO instructors, for that purpose.

U.S. instructors already trained last year the first group of 12 teaching personnel for the Armenian army’s newly established paramedic school. Ohanian personally attended their graduation ceremony.

U.S.-Armenian military cooperation appears to have been largely unaffected so far by Western powers’ standoff with Russia, Armenia’s main military ally, over the conflict in Ukraine.

Breaking News: France:Chief Suspect in Paris Attacks Died in Raid, France Says

November 19, 2015 By administrator

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian militant suspected of having orchestrated the Paris terrorist attacks was killed in a police raid in the northern Paris suburb of St.-Denis early Wednesday, the French authorities announced on Thursday.
The death of the plot’s alleged ringleader ended one chapter of the intense criminal investigation that began on Friday night, when three teams of terrorists, in a series of closely coordinated raids, killed 129 people.
But many questions remained unanswered: how Mr. Abbaoud planned and organized the attacks; whether the Islamic State is planning additional attacks outside of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq; and the identities of several of the attackers.
Also on Thursday, the Belgian police conducted their own sweep in Brussels on Thursday.
Seven raids are being conducted in Brussels in relation to Bilal Hadfi, one of the dead Paris attackers, a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor said, adding that the houses of Mr. Hadfi’s friends and relatives were being searched. One person has been detained for questioning.

Former Tajik police chief reappears as IS fighter in video report French24

May 28, 2015 By administrator

by Akbar Borisov

DUSHANBE (TAJIKISTAN) (AFP) A man claiming to be the former head of ex-Soviet Tajikistan’s special forces police division appeared in a video Wednesday saying he has joined the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria.

The man resembling Colonel Gulmurod Halimov, 40, who sparked panic after failing to report for duty in late April, says in the footage that he was driven to join the group by the impoverished state’s perceived anti-Islamic policies. report french24

“We are coming for you, Inshallah,” he tells the Tajik government.

Tajikistan’s Ministry of the Interior refused to comment on the video, which has been widely shared on social networks.

In the clip of more than 10 minutes, which appears with the logo of the Furat media collective believed to be under the control of the Islamic State, Halimov wears black clothing and headwear and totes what appears to be a sniper rifle.

Calling Tajikistan’s president and interior minister “dogs”, Halimov asks soldiers in the country’s armed forces if they are “prepared to die” for a government that cracks down on public expressions of Islam such as hijab-wearing and praying in the street.

He also appeals to the more than one million Tajik nationals working in Russia to cease being “slaves” and join IS.

According to Tajik media, citing security sources, the colonel, who says he received formal military training in both Russia and the United States, is believed to have flown to Moscow on May 1 with “almost 10” people.

Tajikistan’s authoritarian and secular President Emomali Rakhmon, who oversaw the government’s victory against a coalition involving Islamist forces in a 1990s civil war, has said that “hell awaits” Muslims killing other Muslims in the Syrian conflict.

But his government has been criticised by rights groups for everything from forced beard shavings to numerous convictions of believers on religious extremism grounds.