The 28-year-old Sona Mnatsakanian died while crossing a street in central Yerevan. The police SUV did not stop after the collision. Pashinian’s limousine and six other cars making up his convoy also drove past the dying woman.
“Don’t you understand that it wasn’t my convoy, it was the bus of Armenia’s prime minister, to put it bluntly?” Pashinian told reporters, responding to lingering questions about his role in the deadly accident. “In other words, I'm sitting in a car that's serving me, and three cars away, a very sad incident is happening. I called [the victim’s family,] I offered my condolences, I'm sorry.”
“There's a court case going on, what should I do?” he said. “I'm not even a witness in that case because I didn't even see it.”
Pashinian referred to the ongoing protracted trial of police Major Aram Navasardian, the driver of the car that killed Mnatsakanian. Navasardian went on trial in November 2022 on charges of reckless driving and negligence denied by him. The Armenian police never fired or even suspended him.
Navasardian is the sole defendant in the trial, a fact presented by Mnataskanian’s family as proof of a high-level coverup of the young woman’s death. It has pointed to investigators’ failure to prosecute any members of Pashinian’s security detail.
The lawyer representing the family, Raffi Aslanian, has repeatedly demanded that criminal charges be also brought against two senior security officers who were in charge of the motorcade. Aslanian says that they failed to comply with a legal speed limit set for government motorcades and to block street crossings along the route of Pashinian’s journey. The prosecutor overseeing the investigation has rejected the demand.
Nor has there been a formal inquiry into the disappearance of what would have been a key piece of evidence: the audio of radio conversations among security personnel that escorted Pashinian that day. Security services claim that the conversations were not recorded due to a technical malfunction.
Aslanian repeated the allegations of the coverup when he reacted to Pashinian’s remarks later in the day.
“[Pashinian] is responsible in the sense that his convoy ran over a pregnant woman and no one has been held accountable as a result,” the lawyer told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “The victim’s family has the impression that there is something that is not known to us, an interference … that is being concealed.”
Pashinian was blamed by some of his critics for another road accident that occurred last month. Three people, including a police officer, were injured when their cars collided on a highway in the southern Ararat province just seconds after the prime minister’s motorcade raced through it. The Armenian Interior Ministry insisted that the accident was not caused by the convoy.