At 3 am on the night of May 28, unidentified assailants burned the door of the apartment of Larisa Paremuzyan, member of the People's Party ofArmeniaand proposed majoritarian candidate for Constituency 31 in the Lori Marz.

Paremuzyan is a correspondent for Hetq in Lori. She had not been writing over the past two months because of her involvement in the elections. But Paremuzyan had already started work, as previously agreed, on an article which focused on financial abuse by the foundation run by Karen Saribekyan, who later won the majoritarian seat from the same constituency. Saribekyan is the director of the Debed branch of the Armenian Electrical Network. It is possible that this attack was a reaction to that article, which we will publish in the near future.

Larisa Paremuzyan lives alone in Alaverdi, in an apartment on the second floor of a five-story building. She was awoken at 3 am by the sound of flames crackling and a stifling cloud of smoke.

“By some lucky coincidence, I woke up at 3 am. If I had been a heavy sleeper, I wouldn't be alive today. My whole home would have burned down,” said the recent parliamentary candidate. She awoke to find her house engulfed in smoke and the apartment door aflame. She tried to turn on the light but it did not work. The electrical wiring had melted in the fire.Larisaran to the balcony and called her neighbors to help.

Fifth-floor resident Nara Martirosyan said that the smoke had reached her floor and it had become impossible to breathe. “We held the children out the window, so that they could have air to breathe,” she said. Her husband tried to help their neighbor, but was unable to go down to the second floor.

“The building entry was full of smoke,” the neighbors said.Larisa's cries for help drew the neighbors from the adjacent building entry.

Margarita Alaverdyan was awoken at 3 am by her neighbor's cries. “We saw that the door was burning,” she said. They put out the fire and then, with the help of other neighbors, managed to open the door. The neighbors had already put out the flames when the fire brigade arrived forty minutes later.

The assailants had attempted to burn Larisa Paremuzyan's door with a burning tire, pouring deisel fule on the tire and the door itself.

When we arrived, Viktoria Karapetyan, a resident of the fourth floor, had already cleaned the walls of the building entry and was washing off the tire marks left on the door from the night before. The young women said she had been terrified by the blaze and that it had been impossible to come downstairs to help her neighbor. The residents of the building had been frightened even more by the possibility of gas explosions. Margarita Alaverdyan said that the gas pipeline had been only two meters from the door and if they had not been able to put out the flames, there would definitely have been an explosion.

 “If they wanted to take revenge on me, they should have done it outside the building,” said Larisa Paremuzyan angrily. She had been more concerned for her neighbors and their small children than for herself. She views the event as an assassination attempt and believes that Karen Saribekyan, the Republican candidate who won the majoritarian seat in Constituency 31 and Vram Vanyan, president of the local electoral committee, are behind it. On May 18, she had sent the Lori Prosecutor a letter detailing the electoral fraud which occurred in the constituency and asked him to hold responsible Vram Vanyan and Karen Saribekyan, whose advantage the fraud had been in. According to Larisa Paremuzyan, on the day of the elections, there had been 2,852 errors in the proportional votes and 3,807 in the majoritarian votes in Constituency 31.

“Why had nothing like this happened before my letter of complaint?” asked the victim. She has had reasons to suspect her main rival Karen Saribekyan and his people since the campaign period, when they stopped her from visiting the villages and meeting with citizens.

“And now this,” continuedLarisa. She also linked the fire to a meeting she had had with someone – whom she did not name – a week ago. The stranger had asked to meet her, saying that he had documents to give her which would prove Saribekyan's involvement in the electoral fraud. They met in Dsegh and Larisa Paremuzyan was handed two campaign booklets – one from the 2003 elections, the other from this year – where there was contradictory information about Karen Saribekyan's education. The stranger also promised to giveLarisamore documents later, proving other illegal activity by Saribekyan.Larisasaid that her rival had probably learned of these meetings and decided to try and scare her.

A criminal case had been filed in the Lori Marz investigation department of the Armenian police. The case is based on Article 185, Parargraph 1, Point 2 of the Criminal Code – “destroying or damaging someone else property willfully through arson, explosion or other publicly dangerous methods.”

“Was my door the only issue here?” asked Larisa Paremuzyan. She did not believe that the police would solve the case and find the real people behind the crime.