The unbearable pain of a grieving family has been met with silence, indifference, and a shameful display of impunity from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government. Nearly two years after 28-year-old Sona Mnatsakanyan—pregnant with her first child—was fatally struck by a police vehicle in Pashinyan’s motorcade, her family is still fighting an uphill battle for justice. Instead of accountability, they have been met with a coverup designed to shield those responsible.
The trauma of this injustice has now claimed another victim. On Monday, Mnatsakanyan’s uncle suffered a heart attack during the protracted trial of the officer who drove the vehicle that killed her. The strain of witnessing the state’s relentless attempts to evade responsibility proved too much to bear.
“He simply told me, ‘I don’t feel well, let me go out for a minute,’” said the family’s lawyer, Raffi Aslanyan. “Moments later, they came and took his coat away, saying that an ambulance took him to the hospital. It looked like a heart attack, which was later confirmed in the hospital.”
Mnatsakanyan’s death was no ordinary accident—it was a brutal reminder of how the powerful can escape accountability in Pashinyan’s Armenia. She was crossing the street in central Yerevan when a speeding police SUV struck her and left her to die. The vehicle didn’t even stop. Instead, it drove on, as did the prime minister’s limousine and six other cars in his motorcade. None of them paused for even a moment to check if the young woman had survived.
The driver, police Major Aram Navasardyan, was charged with reckless driving and negligence, but Armenian courts twice released him despite his arrest. Shockingly, he was never fired or even suspended from the police force. Adding insult to injury, his defense team has had the audacity to blame the victim for her own death.
For Mnatsakanyan’s family, the coverup has been as painful as the loss itself. Investigators refused to prosecute anyone from Pashinyan’s security detail, despite clear evidence that the prime minister’s motorcade had a duty to stop. The final insult came when it was revealed that the security services conveniently “lost” the audio recordings of radio conversations between the escorting officers that day—claiming, of course, a mysterious “technical malfunction.”
“It seems that we are fighting against the state apparatus,” Mnatsakanyan’s uncle said last year, a statement that tragically rings even truer today.
The young woman’s father, Mnatsakan Mnatsakanyan, has also suffered immensely, recently undergoing his third heart surgery. His health has deteriorated under the weight of both grief and injustice.
Meanwhile, the trial of Navasardyan drags on at a snail’s pace—another tactic, the family fears, to ensure that the statute of limitations runs out in 2027, allowing the sole suspect to walk free.
And where is Pashinyan in all of this? Silent. He has never once publicly addressed Mnatsakanyan’s death, let alone offered condolences to her family. His motorcade drove past a dying woman, and his government has since done everything in its power to erase her memory and protect those responsible.
This is not just negligence—it is cruelty. And it exposes the true nature of Pashinyan’s government: a regime that claims to stand for democracy and justice but protects its own at any cost, even when an innocent young woman and her unborn child have paid the ultimate price.
