Two men were wounded by a grenade they detonated as they attempted to storm a police station in Armenia's capital on March 24, the Interior Ministry of the Caucasus country said.
The two men were among three who attempted to break into the administrative building of the Nor Nork police precinct of Yerevan at around 5 p.m. local time, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The men detonated a grenade during the attempt to penetrate the building, the ministry said, adding that the two injured men, described as a 52-year-old and a 56-year-old, were taken to the hospital with shrapnel wounds in their legs.
The ministry said the third armed man remained outside the police station threatening to blow it up with a hand grenade. Negotiations were initially held to convince him to surrender. Later, it was reported that a National Security Service task force had detained the man.
It was not immediately clear what the motives or demands of the attackers were.
Armen Pambukhchian, deputy mayor of Yerevan, told reporters at the scene that it was obvious that the incident was "characteristic" of a terrorist act.
He said authorities had made "no assumptions" thus far, but according to Armenia's Criminal Code, it is a terrorist act when a person appears at the police station armed or with explosive material.
Earlier on March 24, the police said that 49 members of a fringe opposition group, which has protested against territorial concessions to Azerbaijan, had been detained on suspicion that they were carrying weapons.
The detained members of the group, known as Combat Brotherhood, had planned to visit the village of Verin Voskepar in Armenia’s northeastern Tavush Province at the border with Azerbaijan earlier on March 24 for what they described as “tactical training.”
Verin Voskepar is near four formerly Azerbaijani-populated villages that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his government say must be ceded to Azerbaijan to avert a war. The villages, which have been controlled by the Armenian military since the early 1990s, used to be part of Soviet Azerbaijan.
The group issued a statement denying its involvement in the incident at the Nor Nork police station.
“The group has nothing to do with what happened. We condemn any type of terrorist activity. We have acted and will continue to act only within the framework of the law,” Combat Brotherhood said on Facebook.
The Combat Brotherhood said on March 23 that authorities had visited their office and urged them to refrain from their planned visit to Verin Voskepar, but a group of activists left for Tavush Province on March 24.
Hrant Ter-Abrahamian, the head of the organization, announced later that all the detained members of the group had been freed and again denied their involvement in the police station incident.