On October 9 at the court proceedings on the case of terrorist attack on the National Assembly of Armenia committed on October 27, 1999 at the National Assembly of Armenia (during which 8 senior officials of the country were shot dead, including the Speaker of the Parliament and the Prime Minister), the petition of journalists Ruzan Khachatrian, Anna Israelian, Narineh Dilbarian and Alexander Melkumian to recognize them to be an injured party. The petition was submitted to the judge at chair Samvel Uzunian on September 29. The journalists motivated their address by the fact that the during the tragic events they, too, incurred both material and moral damage, and it is unclear why some of the deputies who only spent a few minutes in the session room were recognized to be an injured party, while the representatives of “the fourth estate” who stayed there much longer were only summoned as witnesses. The court rejected the petition of the journalists on the motivation that the terrorist attack was directed against the NA deputies and the representatives of the power, and not against the journalists.
