Former director of the National Security Service Georgi Kutoyan is the victim of Armenia’s authoritarian system. This is what leader of Yerkir Tsirani political party Zaruhi Postanjyan told reporters today.

“The case was instituted with the corpus delicti of inciting suicide, but regardless of whether Georgi Kutoyan was incited to commit suicide or was murdered, it is a murder, and we need to record this. Of course, it is important to know how this happened, but we need to state that a former high-ranking official has been killed. It is the duty of the law-enforcement authorities to reveal this murder. If the state doesn’t protect the right to life, the state itself becomes an accomplice to the particular crime. This is troubling and dangerous for everyone. First of all, I express my condolences to the wife, parents and relatives of Georgi Kutoyan,” she stated.

According to Postanjyan, Kutoyan is the victim of unlawful acts that are ongoing. “When Serzh Sargsyan issued a decree and appointed Kutoyan director of the National Security Service in 2016, I challenged the decree in the Administrative Court, and even though the court unlawfully didn’t accept it for proceedings, Mr. Kutoyan didn’t meet the criteria of a director of the National Security Service. Kutoyan was a victim of this authoritarian system. No current or former high-ranking official can be protected, if we don’t have checks and balances in our country,” she said.