Armenia’s three main law-enforcement bodies have launched a joint investigation into the shock murder of Gevorg Mheryan, a deputy chief of the national police, officials said on Wednesday. Mheryan was shot dead late on Tuesday moments after leaving his seventh-floor apartment in Yerevan. According to the Office of the Prosecutor-General, the 33-year-old was received four bullets, three of them in his head, as he waited for the elevator. RA President Serzh Sargsyan signed a decree, July 2, 2008, appointing Gevorg Mheryan, 34, Deputy Chief of the RA Police. Prior to that, Mheryan was the RA President’s Aide and was Chairman of the Anti-Corruption Strategy Monitoring Group. Arabkir Department of the RA Police received a call, saying RA Deputy Police Chief Col. Gevorg Mheryan was shot dead as he was about to enter his apartment on the seventh floor of a multistory building in 65 Barbyus St., the Press Service of the RA Police reports. A statement by the office said its Special Investigative Service (SIS) as well as the Armenian police and the National Security Service (NSS) swiftly formed a special team tasked with solving the crime. It said the SIS opened on Tuesday night a criminal case under two articles of Armenia’s Criminal Code. One of them deals with murders of individuals committed as a result of their work. Hector Sardaryan, a senior SIS official leading the probe, told that the investigators believe Mheryan was most probably gunned down because of his “professional activities.” He declined to elaborate. Sardaryan also suggested that the lone gunman who shot the police official was not an experienced killer. He argued that the investigators found eight cartridge cases at the scene of the crime, which suggests that half of the gunshots fired from close range missed the target. The gun used in the shooting did not have a silencer, added Sardaryan. Meanwhile, the chief of the Armenian police, Alik Sargsyan, briefed Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan on details of the inquiry on Wednesday as he presented an annual report on his agency’s activities. Sargsyan described Mheryan’s murder as a “serious blow to the police” and said the investigators are working hard to identify and punish the guilty. Both the prime minister and parliament speaker Hovik Abrahamyan expressed their condolences to Mheryan’s family. In a written statement, Abrahamyan condemned the “brutal crime” and urged the law-enforcement bodies to take “all necessary measures” to solve it. Mheryan was appointed as deputy police chief in July as part of a reshuffle of the higher echelon of Armenia’s security apparatus initiated by President Serzh Sargsyan. He is thought to have been mainly in charge of the police departments issuing passports and dealing with immigration and legal affairs. Yesterday Alik Sargsyan said, “Gevorg Melikyan’s murder was painful for our structure.”
