YEREVAN (Hetq Online)– On November 23, schoolteacher Mariam Sukhudyan, 29, was interrogated at the Erebuni Investigative Unit. The young activist faces slander charges in a case regarding alleged sexual abuse by staff members at the Nubarashen Special School #10.

Sukhudyan’s defense team has been bolstered by the addition of a new attorney, Liparit Simonyan. She will be accompanied to the interrogation by her two attorneys. The case has been sent back for further pre-trial examination.

One of her attorneys, Nona Galstyan, claims that the charges against Sukhudyan have failed to be substantiated based on the materials presented during the pre-trail investigation and they have proven that Levon Avagyan, one of the school staff, did indeed engage in sexual abuse of the pupils.

Between April and June of 2008, Sukhudyan and a few other volunteers, worked under the auspices of the United Nations financed “10 Best Schools” project carried out at the #11 Nubarashen Special Needs School. They uncovered evidence that certain members of the school staff had engaged in sexual abuse of the kids, physical violence and forced labor. They handed over their findings to various media outlets.

On November 13, 2008, Armenian Public Television aired a recorded interview with D.A., a pupil at the school, regarding sexual abuse carried out by the Armenian language and literature teacher. Ten days later, a second interview was broadcast featuring school graduate H.S. The girl spoke of similar abuse to which she was subjected at the hands of the same teacher.

On the basis of this reportage, the Erebuni Investigative Unit started to prepare a case. The teacher in question subsequently filed a complaint stating that he had been slandered.

On February 11, 2009, the Police Department’s Erebuni Investigative Unit opened a criminal case of slander based on the statements of the school pupil D.A. During a videotaped interview, D.A. recanted her earlier claims and told police that Sukhudyan had convinced her to say such things. Six months later, Sukhudyan was charged with “false denunciation” for personal gain.

On October 10, the charge was changed to “slander” under Article 135 of the RA Criminal Code. Pupil D.A. had talked about abuses at the school in front of the video camera. During her conversation with Arman Gharibyan, D.A. attested to the fact that an individual from the school showed up at their house and spoke to her mother and that she was later forced to offer testimony that contradicted the acts. The girl said that friends and family members had seen her on television and that she had become a target of ridicule.

This telephone conversation was handed over to the police investigative unit. In the provided recording of the conversation prepared by the investigator the segment where D.A. states that she will have to lie as to the facts was conveniently left out. Furthermore, the investigator threw out the original phone recording as admissible evidence.

The second video tape broadcast by Armenian Public Television also met with no response by law enforcement despite the fact that four other school graduates also spoke about similar incidents of abuse and stuck by their claims during a face-to-face meeting with the teacher and school principal.

“However, the investigator found the above testimonies to be non-credible, reasoning that the school pupils are not able to perceive and reconstruct the facts since no psychological or psychiatric examination of any of the students in question, as stipulated by the law, was ever conducted,” Galstyan said.

Galstyan added that Sukhudyan was charged based on the testimony of only one of the school’s pupils, the girl D.A. and that, despite the contradictions in her testimony, she was never personally interrogated.

The school’s teaching staff and principal rejected out of hand any allegations of impropriety at the school.

“Their realm of imagination is quite extensive. Perhaps, it is possible that they just dreamt the stuff up, without deceiving. Not even the most imaginative of authors could have written such a book,” stated school principal Meruzhan Yengibaryan in an interview with Armenian Public Television.

The charges against Sukhudyan appear to be solely based on the interpretation that she singled out pupil D.A, and directed her to make the claims she did solely for personal gain. Investigators allege Sukhudyan was irate that the school principal refused to allocate the 1 million AMD United Nation’s grant to them all at once, but decided to hand over the money in installments.

“We had to purchase school books and we needed some of the money.” Sukhudyan said. ”We had a discussion with the principal and his reply was, ‘No, how can I be sure what will happen.’ There was no problem and we entered into an agreement with the United Nations. We paid for the items out of our own pockets, collected the receipts, and later were reimbursed by the school.”

Today, D.A. is no longer in Armenia and her whereabouts remain a secret. The Armenian language and literature teacher alleged to have abused the pupils no longer works at the special needs school, He had tendered his resignation.

The pre-trial examination of the criminal case has been completed. Sukhudyan has signed an affidavit certifying that she will not leave the city before the trial begins.

“After the second charge was filed, they suggested that I declare my guilt and thus be granted amnesty,” Sukhudyan said. “The investigator told me that the charge fell under the amnesty provisions and that if I only confessed the charges would be dropped. I told them I wouldn’t agree to such terms and that we demanded to know who the actual law-breakers were,” Mariam says.

Galstyan has filed several motions with the court. On November 6, the volunteers who had worked at the school sent a letter to the chief prosecutor pointing out the illegalities and inaccuracies in the investigatory unit’s actions to date. They demanded that all criminal charges against Sukhudyanbe dropped immediately.

This article combines two stories recently published by Hetq Online.