Pashinian was targeted by the man, Albert Arustamian, on Friday evening as he was about to meet with a relative living in the city’s northern Zeytun district. The apple was thrown from an apartment block located in the same neighborhood. It reportedly did not hit Pashinian or any of his bodyguards.
“Eyewitnesses (neighborhood children) say that Nikol Pashinian and his bodyguard thought a grenade was thrown in their direction and immediately lay down on the ground,” Arustamian’s lawyer, Roman Yeritsian, claimed in a weekend Facebook post.
Police detained Arustamian hours after the incident. According to Yeritsian, his two daughters and a granddaughter were also forcibly taken to a nearby police station for questioning.
The suspect, who is a native and former resident of Nagorno-Karabakh, was on Sunday charged with hooliganism and released from custody pending investigation. The crime attributed to him is punishable by heavy fines and/or a prison sentence of up to two years.
Yeritsian denounced the accusation, saying that his client would not have been indicted had he pelted an ordinary citizen with the apple.
“I think that the whole thing is about the target of the apple,” the lawyer told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday. “When the target is Nikol Pashinian, they launch a criminal investigation into hooliganism.”
Yeritsian pointed out that parliament speaker Alen Simonian, a key political ally of Pashinian, was not prosecuted for spitting at a heckler in a popular dining area of central Yerevan in April 2023.
Just days after that scandalous incident, law-enforcement authorities arrested and charged a woman who threw her umbrella at Pashinian during the prime minister’s visit to a village in southeastern Vayots Dzor province. Although the woman was set free shortly afterwards, she stood trial and received a suspended 2-year prison sentence in May this year. A local court also ruled that the umbrella must be confiscated and destroyed.
