On January 17, 2020, 38-year-old Georgi Kutoyan, former Director of Armenia’s National Security Service, was found dead in his Yerevan apartment with a gunshot wound to his temple. His legally owned Glock 34 pistol lay beside him. The official ruling: suicide. But the details tell a different story — one of 35 unheard gunshots, Wikipedia deletions, and a case that remains unsolved six years later.
In December 2019, weeks before his death, Kutoyan had visited the apartment alone, consumed alcohol, and fired 35 shots from the unsilenced Glock into the walls between the kitchen and living room. His wife later collected the cartridges at his request. Yet neighbors told journalists they heard nothing — a physical impossibility with an unsilenced firearm. The day before his death, someone using the username “Georgi Kutoyan” attempted to delete his biography from Armenian Wikipedia. The head of the Investigative Committee initially told reporters the death “could have been a homicide disguised as suicide” before the official narrative shifted to “suicide for personal reasons.”
Kutoyan possessed knowledge that made him dangerous to powerful people. As NSS Director under President Serzh Sargsyan from 2016 to 2018, he oversaw the agency during a period of state capture. After the 2018 Velvet Revolution, his successor complained that sensitive documents — including those related to the March 1, 2008 massacre — had gone missing from NSS archives. Yet Kutoyan was never questioned by any investigative body. He had been awarded a Cambridge Trust Scholarship and returned to Armenia for the holidays when he died. At the scene, Constitutional Court President Hrayr Tovmasyan arrived and was filmed sobbing. The criminal case, opened under “incitement to suicide,” has produced no suspects, no charges, and no answers.