"Armenia: body of former military prosecutor Tigran Sukiasyan found dead" By Carlo Coppola
La versione originale di questo articolo "Armenia, ritrovato morto l’ex procuratore militare Tigran Sukiasyan" articolo di Carlo Coppola su "In Città Giovinazzo" diretto dal prof. Antonio Calisi.
Հայաստանում հայտնաբերվել է նախկին զինվորական դատախազ Տիգրան Սուքիասյանի դին: Կառլո Կոպպոլայի հոդված.
The discovery of a body beneath Yerevan's Victory Bridge on February 22, 2026, has stirred unsettling memories. For years, the Hrazdan River has seemed to draw those broken by desperate circumstances to its banks — but this time, the name involved belongs to a prominent figure from Armenia's judicial establishment during the presidencies of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan.
The deceased has been identified as Tigran Sukiasyan, a former military prosecutor. He had served as Prosecutor at the Military Garrison Prosecutor's Office of Syunik — Armenia's southernmost province, bordering Azerbaijan — where he handled criminal cases within the armed forces. In January 2024, he was removed from his post as part of a reorganization ordered by Prosecutor General Anna Vardapetyan, in line with the broader institutional reforms that followed the Velvet Revolution. After leaving his judicial role, Sukiasyan took on a senior position at a state non-commercial entity, heading the National Bureau for Expert Examinations and Forensic Investigations.
His death, however, extends well beyond routine news. In Armenia, any case involving a magistrate inevitably raises questions about the distribution of power within a post-Soviet state. Founded in 1991 amid profound institutional fragility, the Armenian state made the Prosecutor's Office one of the most politically sensitive institutions in the country: whoever controlled prosecutorial action held direct influence over national stability.
Between 1998 and 2008, Armenia's investigative judiciary went through a particularly turbulent and violent period. The assassination of the Prosecutor General in 1998 laid bare the risks faced by those investigating the country's emerging economic and political elites, while the deaths of several deputy prosecutors remained shrouded in ambiguity — a symbol of the vulnerability inherent in prosecutorial roles. These were not isolated incidents, but rather reflections of deeper geopolitical tensions shaping a young democracy: clashes between Soviet-era institutions and new ruling classes, rivalries between security services, competing economic interests, and the unresolved shadow of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Both civil and military prosecutor's offices thus became critical arenas for internal power struggles, as investigations into privatizations, corruption, and the ties between politics and business could fundamentally alter the balance of forces. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, a perception took hold in the public consciousness that the building of the Armenian state was playing out through silent battles within its own institutions.
Sukiasyan's death reactivates that historical memory today. The 2018 Velvet Revolution led by Nikol Pashinyan aimed to break with the past and strengthen democratic institutions — yet the military defeat of 2020 and the political divisions that followed have reopened deep fault lines between state apparatuses, opposition forces, and economic interests. In this context, the violent death of a former prosecutor is never a neutral event: it serves as a sensitive indicator of the health of Armenia's democratic institutions.
Carlo Coppola
