YEREVAN, MAY 31, NOYAN TAPAN. Gegham Badalian, defendant in the case of murder of the community head of Dalar village (Ararat marz) Tigran Petrosian, testified at the May 30 court sitting. The defendant did not admit that he committed a murder out of revenge, saying that he had no intention to kill: "I don't remember how all this happened." The victim's legal successor said that according to a statement of the defendant he was going to shoot quails but he had loaded his gun with large cartridges. The indictment says that on August 30, 2006, at about 9:30 am, G. Badalian followed T. Petrosian on his way to work. In the yard of the Dalar village's administrative building, he fired from his single-barrelled gun four times at T. Petrosian who died on the spot. According to the indictment, resident of the village of Dalar G. Badalian, who worked in 1996-2005 as the community head of this village, embezzled 1,891,800 drams of the 10,981,700 drams collected by the village administration from land taxation, land lease, property taxation, property lease and alienation, local taxes by abusing his official position in 2004-2005. Besides, abusing his official position, G. Badalian in August 2005 collected 15,000 kg of grain of the total value of 1,800,000 drams from villagers against land tax, while in September of the same year he collected 212,000 drams from villagers for construction of a water-line - 400,000 drams of this money he used for the water-line's construction, while the remaining sum of 1,612,00 drams he embezzled. According to the indictment, during the inventory in December 2005, the newly elected community head of Dalar Tigran Petrosian revealed the embezzlements of G. Badalian and informed law inforcement bodies about it. In June 2006, T. Petrosian filed a lawsuit on confiscation of unpaid payments for leased lands to the court of first instance of Ararat marz, due to which G. Badalian decided to take revenge on T. Petrosian and kill him. The defendant denied the charge of embezzlement, saying that he does not decline to pay the indicted money - in his words, it was mainly spent on contruction of the water-line. The court started the examination of case materials.

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