A 71-year-old resident of Yerevan is facing charges carrying up to two years in prison after hurling an apple towards Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in an apparent protest against his policies.
Pashinyan was targeted by the man, Albert Arustamyan, on Friday evening as he was about to meet with a relative living in the city’s northern Zeytun district. The apple was thrown from an apartment block located in the same neighborhood. It reportedly did not hit Pashinyan or any of his bodyguards.
“Eyewitnesses (neighborhood children) say that Nikol Pashinyan and his bodyguard thought a grenade was thrown in their direction and immediately lay down on the ground,” Arustamyan’s lawyer, Roman Yeritsian, claimed in a weekend Facebook post.
Police detained Arustamyan hours after the incident. According to Yeritsian, his two daughters and a granddaughter were also forcibly to a nearby police station for questioning.
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The suspect, who is a native and former resident of Nagorno-Karabakh, was on Sunday charged with hooliganism and released from custody pending investigation. The crime attributed to him is punishable by heavy fines and/or a prison sentence of up to two years.
Yeritsian denounced the accusation, saying that his client would not have been indicted had he pelted an ordinary citizen with the apple.
“I think that the whole thing is about the target of the apple,” the lawyer told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday. “When the target is Nikol Pashinyan, they launch a criminal investigation into hooliganism.”
Yeritsian pointed out that parliament speaker Alen Simonian, a key political ally of Pashinyan, was not prosecuted for spitting at a heckler in a popular dining area of central Yerevan in April 2023.
Just days after that scandalous incident, law-enforcement authorities arrested and charged a woman who threw her umbrella at Pashinyan during the prime minister’s visit to a village in southeastern Vayots Dzor province. Although the woman was set free shortly afterwards, she stood trial and received a suspended 2-year prison sentence in May this year. A local court also ruled that the umbrella must be confiscated and destroyed.
