Ankiun+3 , a television station in the city of Alaverdi in the Lori Marz, went on the air two hours and forty minutes late on April 22 nd . At around 6 p.m., employees of the TV station had discovered that the two cables going to the TV tower had been cut. The damage had taken place on the roof of the five-floor building. "It was pretty thick cable and our technical staff thinks that they were cut with pliers," said Karine Simonyan, a journalist for Ankiun+3. "The places where they were cut were rolled in sheets of metal and the parts of the cables hadn't been moved away from each other, so it wouldn't be noticed at first glance. Our workers went to check the cable and that was when they saw it had been cut."

The director of the TV station, Sos Siradeghyan, is sure the damage was intentional and is somehow connected to the Alaverdi mayoral elections scheduled for May 8 th . There are three candidates: Eduard Sharmazanov, the deputy head of the youth organization of the Republican Party and assistant to the rector of the Yerevan Pedagogical University, Artur Nalbandyan, the director of the Tumanyan branch of the Electric Net CJSC, and, according to our information, the candidate supported by Lori Marzpet (Governor) Henrik Kochinyan, and the incumbent, Saribek Ohanyan, who no longer has the backing of any political faction.

This is not the first time Ankiun+3 has been taken off the air-it happened during the 2003 parliamentary elections as well. (See The Lori Governor's Crusade).

Siradeghyan has informed the National Security Service of the incident and asked the Prosecutor's Office to launch a criminal investigation. All three mayoral candidates have visited Ankiun+3 to voice their suspicions about the incident. Station management is as yet unwilling to speculate as to who may have wanted to take Ankiun+3 off the air.