During yesterday’s meeting with students at Yerevan State University, Robert Kocharyan was asked to comment on the revelation of the secretly recorded conversation of Arthur Baghdasaryan with an official of the U.K. Embassy by an Armenian newspaper. Robert Kocharyan said when he learned about this media revelation, he at first thought it was not true. However, he instructed the National Security Service to look into this, and found out that the recording existed, and there was a conversation. The National Security Service even talked to the leader of the New Times Party who stated on ALM channel that he had listened to this recording. The NSS invited Aram Karapetyan and found out that he had listened to the recording a month and a half ago. “Our special service did it for the sake of formality, since this political figure is fond of showing off, is aware of everything, is involved in everything, and invited him for a talk without taking his statement seriously. However, he provided convincing facts that he got the recording a month and a half ago, that someone had put it under the doormat,” Robert Kocharyan says. With regard to the content of the recording, Kocharyan says it is difficult to imagine that the ex-speaker of parliament is capable of such an abject move. “For me this is betrayal, and it looks uglier because it was voluntary, nobody was caught, tortured or offered anything; you persuade a foreign diplomat, with three months to go before the election, that efforts should be made for a poor evaluation of the election,” says Kocharyan.
