Three Assailants Arrested After Armed Attack on a Police Station in Yerevan

YEREVAN — Two men were wounded and another arrested during an apparent armed attack on a police station in Yerevan launched by them on Sunday.

According to the Armenian police, they detonated a hand grenade while trying to break into the police headquarters of the city’s northern Nor Nork district. Two of them were injured by the blast and hospitalized while the other remained outside the building, threatening to set off another grenade, the police spokesman, Narek Sargsyan, told reporters.

Sargsyan said that the man was “neutralized” by security forces “without the use of firearms” following a two-hour standoff. An anti-terror squad of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) was seen arriving at the scene during the standoff.

Another law-enforcement body, the Investigative Committee, said later in the day that it has launched a criminal inquiry into “terrorism.” Neither the committee nor the police said anything about the attackers’ motives.

Earlier on Sunday, the police rounded up and detained 49 members of a group, called Combat Brotherhood, who were about to visit one of the border areas in northern Tavush province. All of them were reportedly set free hours later.

The Yerevan daily Hraparak reported, meanwhile, that all three attackers are supporters of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a pro-Western and nationalist fringe group. It quoted a senior NDA figure as saying that two of them are veterans of the 2020 war with Azerbaijan while the other lost a son during the six-week hostilities.

The NDA leaders have close ties to jailed members of an armed group that stormed another Armenian police station in 2016 to demand that then President Serzh Sarkisyan step down. The three dozen gunmen, who took police officers and medical personnel hostage, laid down their weapons after a two-week standoff with security forces which left three police officers dead.