Vahe Sarukhanyan
Edik Baghdasaryan

At about 10:30 or 11:00 at night on December 9, 2006, ten masked officers of the National Security Service burst into Beijing Restaurant on Tumanyan Street where Jirair Sefilyan and his Lebanese-Armenian friend Ralf Yirikyan, a citizen of Lebanon and the executive director of the company Vivacell, and their wives were having dinner.

Sefilyan and Yirikyan were arrested; the latter was soon set free.

Jirair Sefilyan, a citizen of Lebanon who is the commander of the special detachment of Shushi, reserve lieutenant colonel, bearer of the order of Military Cross of the First Degree, coordinator of the civil initiative groups Defense of the Liberated Territories and Union of Armenian Volunteers , and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Araks-Kur Foundation for the Resettlement and Development of Javakh and Vardan Malkhasyan, a member of the board of the Fatherland and Honor party and head of party's Ashtarak office, have been held in jail at Yerevan's Kentron Correctional Institution, known as the KGB basement ever since.

Wartime photographs by Hakob Poghosyan