The judicial inquest regarding the claims of the families of people killed during the March 1-2, 2008 post-election clashes started in a Yerevan court April 16. The legal successors of the victims, who appealed to the Court of General Jurisdiction of Yerevan, insist that law enforcement bodies (the Special Investigation Service and the Prosecutor-General’s Office) have not properly investigated the circumstances of the killings.

The relatives of nine out of ten victims appealed to the court submitting four different sets of grievances, which have been separated according to their peculiarities. Only the family of 30-year-old Police Captain Hamlet Tadevosyan has not appealed to the court.

Since last year, the families of the victims have been stating that they are going to appeal to the European Court in order to compel the authorities to investigate their killed sons’ cases objectively; and until now they are sure that they are not going to succeed in Armenian courts, so they rely on international instances.

“No case has been initiated over murders, no one has been held responsible [for the murders] yet, no single murder case has been investigated properly, and the Prosecutor’s Office is responsible for this inaction,” Vahe Grigoryan, the attorney of the victims’ successors, told ArmeniaNow.

Conscript Tigran Abgaryan, 18, died a month after the clashes, in hospital. The cause of his death, according to a forensic conclusion, was “a gunshot wound in the neck, injuries in spine and spinal marrow.”

Meanwhile, his mother, Ruzanna Harutyunyan, says that her son was wearing a bullet-proof jacket that day, and the gunshot hit her son’s only open space – 3 centimeters on the neck.

“How did it happen that a stray bullet hit my son’s neck, in the only – just a 3-centimeter-wide opening? That day he had body armor all over him, a helmet and a shield. If they find out what range the gunshot was fired from, which as specialists say, is quite easy to do, we will know who shot him – an officer, a sniper, or a demonstrator? It is very important [to us], and the only important thing to them is to close the case,” Harutyunyan told ArmeniaNow.

All relatives of the victims insist that the Prosecutor’s Office has not taken serious measures to investigate the cases.

Charges related to those murders have been brought only against four police officers (even though they have not been sentenced yet) for using Cheryomukha-7 special devices. However, these officers have been accused not of murder but rather of ineptly using the tear grenades. This, according to attorneys, is an extremely mild accusation and “an obvious tendency to hush up the case.”

“Nothing has been revealed. It was not difficult to find out where they were. If we fail to find out anything in these courts, then we will appeal to the European Court. But anyway, we will keep on struggling,” Sargis Kloyan, father of Gor Kloyan, 28, a ‘Cheryomukha-7’ victim, told ArmeniaNow.