The conviction of a man charged with hitting police with a plastic bottle has sparked action from human rights agencies, has led to two activists’ arrests for putting up leaflets calling for his release, and has even led some individuals to write confessions that they are guilty of the same crime.

Last week an Armenian court sentenced Edgar Arakelyan, 24, to 18 months in prison for striking police with a plastic Jermuk water bottle while police were breaking up a political demonstration in the early hours of April 13.

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Refugees Arthur Apresyan and Roman Taryan were among 400,000 Armenians who survived Azerbaijan pogroms and massacres in the beginning of 1990; however a decade later the two men found Azerbaijan as a perfect transition country to immigrate to the West.

Apresyan, 48 and Taryan, 38 escaped to Azerbaijan last month leaving their families and friends in Armenia in shock and anger. According to sources in Baku, the men went to Azerbaijan through Sadakhlo (on the border of Georgia) and upon their arrival appealed to Baku based ANS broadcasting company to make their intentions public via broadcast.

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Steven Mann, the new U.S. chief negotiator on Nagorno-Karabakh, paid an unexpected and low-key visit to Yerevan on Thursday which officials said focused on international efforts to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

Mann had separate meetings with President Robert Kocharyan and Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian for the second time in six weeks. No details of the talks were made public, with the U.S. envoy declining to comment on the purpose of his trip and the current status of the peace process. “I am just having talks with the Armenian government,” he told RFE/RL without elaborating.

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