Hrayr Ghukasyan, the lawyer representing the family of a man who died in police custody, said yesterday that the results of official forensic tests disprove police claims that he was not subjected to torture. Ghukasyan stopped short of explicitly endorsing these allegations. But he did reject the official version of the incident, citing the findings of Armenian forensic experts. Ghukasyan stressed, in particular, that they found only three fingerprints on the window out of which Gulyan allegedly jumped to the ground. (Levon Gulyan was found dead at the headquarters of the Armenian Police Service’s Directorate General of Criminal Investigations on May 12). The police claim that he fell to his death while attempting to escape from a second-floor interrogation room of the police building in downtown Yerevan. Gulyan’s relatives deny this, saying that he was tortured to death before being thrown out the window. “One of the fingerprints was from the middle finger of his right hand, and the other two from the middle finger of his left hand. No other fingerprints belonging to Levon Gulyan were found on the window,” he told a news conference. According to the lawyer, the forensic examination also found suspicious traces of palms on the same window, and established that they belonged neither to Gulyan nor to the two law-enforcement officers who the police say interrogated him. “So it can be inferred that the palm imprints were left by a third person who has not been identified by the investigators as of now,” he said.
