During yesterday’s session of the commission in charge of investigating the events of March 1-2 the head of the Police expertise department Stepan Manukian gave information about the operations and work of his department in the morning of March 1 and made a number of sensational announcements.
First, he said that he had been ordered to be ready for conducting expertise works one day before that day and early in the morning on March 1 he was instructed to take his group and go to the Liberty square. “At about 8:30 we were in the place of the events, where the responsible bodies were working to keep safety in that place. The heads of the investigative body divided the square and surrounding areas into separate areas, convened groups consisting of investigators and experts who started to look for facts and proofs, collected those facts and kept those facts for further submission to investigate them correspondingly. The groups consisted of investigators, experts and assistants,” said Mr. Manukian. He says that after checking up the areas of the square they found many weapons such as 3 pistols, bombs, metallic sticks, knives and bottles with explosive materials. “All those facts were documented, the found proofs were investigated with special powder to find fingerprints, after which they packed all those things, stamped and gave to the investigators to institute proceedings later,” he said and added that as a result of that operation they found out that all those materials were not useful from the point of view of having fingerprints. “Those were rusted sticks, glass bottles covered in flammable oil and there could not be any fingerprints on them. The surfaces of the pistols were not convenient for finding fingerprints either. There are many signs on almost all the materials found but alas the specialists could not find useful fingerprints. It was documented in the protocol of place investigation,” he said without specifying what he meant by saying useful fingerprint. In answer to a question whether there are any proofs that those weapons were connected with the demonstrators if there were no fingerprints on them he said that there was a need to investigate also the video recordings to see the work of the experts during that period and to find out what the time intervals of those recordings are. He says that there are rumors that in one recording a policeman is holding a pistol, i.e. a factual proof, in his hands and meanwhile talking to another person. “We should find out when that recording was made because my experts are using gloves when working,” he said and added that the mentioned recording had been shown after working on it because that police officer was his deputy colonel Safaryan who is an experienced professional policeman and could not do that.
According to Manukian, after investigating those three pistols the police found out that those were useful and had been used before being found because there were signs of flame on them. However they cannot say when those pistols were used for the last time. Manukian says that the metallic sticks don’t have smooth surface and are rusted, thus they could not find any fingerprints on them. He also says that there were no fingerprints on the bombs because the criminals either had cleaned them or those fingerprints had been cleaned after being in contact with land.
The chairman of the commission Samvel Nikoyan says that in order to get reliable conclusions they should also apply to other institutions to help them. He says that the commission is going to finish the phase of collecting facts of the events of March 1 soon. “We hope that the commission will have enough information to come to a final conclusion. However we don’t think that the facts provided by the state institutions are enough to find out how the clear picture looks like. It is also important for us to find out which divisions were given with guns, how many bullets they were given, how they used those bullets, when they did it and how many bullets they returned,” Nikoyan said and added that they should meet with the police officers who received those guns, talk to witnesses and the chief police officers in charge of coordinating that process.