On October 27, 1999, five armed men stormed the Armenian parliament and killed Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Speaker Karen Demirchyan, and six others. The gunmen demanded direct negotiations with President Robert Kocharyan, who personally guaranteed their security. Twenty-six years later, the mastermind has never been identified — and an extraordinary number of people connected to the case have died under mysterious circumstances. Of the seven convicted attackers, five have died in prison: from “electrocution” with traces of blows on the head, from hanging after claiming he was injected with psychotropic drugs, from “heart attacks” that their lawyers said were medically impossible. Only three of the original seven remain alive.
The witnesses fared no better. Tigran Naghdalyan, Chairman of Public Television and a key witness, was shot in the head at age 36 outside his parents’ house in 2002. MP Mushegh Movsisyan, another key witness who had been detained in the case, died in a car accident on the Aparan-Yerevan highway in 2004. That same year, Hasmik Abrahamyan, a parliament protocol employee on the witness list, was found hanged inside the National Assembly building itself. Journalist Tigran Nazaryan, who spent two hours with gunman Nairi Hunanyan after the attack and testified about his conversation with Kocharyan, was sent on a trip to the USA by Public TV and never returned — he died unexpectedly in America in 2014.
A former senior FSB officer alleged in 2005 that Russia “had a hand” in the attack — Russia angrily denied it. The investigation was reopened after the 2018 Velvet Revolution, but after four years produced zero new suspects. The systematic elimination of witnesses and defendants over 25 years points to a sustained effort to ensure the mastermind is never identified. First President Levon Ter-Petrosyan has repeatedly accused Kocharyan and Sargsyan of being “the real perpetrators.” The victims had won a May 1999 parliamentary election that “practically sidelined President Kocharyan from the political scene.” After their deaths, Kocharyan quickly consolidated power and dismantled emerging democratic institutions.