Armed men seized a police station in Yerevan, Armenia, on Sunday. Their action was combined with a call for Armenians to take to the streets and for the release of jailed politicians.
From Reuters:
One of their main demands was to free Jirair Sefilian, an opposition politician whom the authorities have accused of plotting civil unrest. Sefilian was jailed in June over allegations of illegally possessing weapons.
Armenia’s security service said one policeman had been killed and two wounded in the violence, but that negotiations were now underway to resolve the standoff peacefully.
Two hostages have been freed, but Armenian news agencies report that several still remain. The group’s supporters spread word that other buildings had also been taken over, but this has been refuted by Armenia’s National Security Service.
There were some reports that the armed men called for the president, Serge Sarkisian, to step down. Sefilian has publicly clashed with Sarkisian over his handling of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders primarily populated by ethnic Armenians in which fighting broke out anew in April. (Though the flare-up has since died down, people on both sides have been killed since.)
Though the armed men released a video saying that they were doing this for their fellow citizens, their call to take to the streets seems not to have been heeded.
