Armenia’s Police Department says it will investigate the actions of special police units earlier today who forcibly removed people who had gathered at Yerevan’s Yerablur Military Pantheon to protest the arrival of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Pashinyan was scheduled to visit the cemetery to mark the 31st anniversary Armenia’s independence and to lay flowers at the graves of fallen Armenian soldiers and politicians.

After Pashinyan left, the protesters, mostly relatives of soldiers who died in the 2020 Artsakh war and those still missing, removed the flowers Pashinyan had placed at a memorial commemorating Armenia’s war dead.

Vahan Hovhannisyan, who represents the heirs of the fallen servicemen, told reporters that the forty people detained for defying the police order to disperse were later released.

Hovhannisyan reported that two of the detained women suffered injuries to their hands during the incident.