Well, almost!
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greensla...ed_armeni.html
Mystery of the deported Armenian 'journalist'
Strenuous efforts
on Thursday and
on Friday to prevent the deportation of
Gina/Jina Khachatryan eventually failed. She was flown out of Heathrow to Valletta, where Maltese journalists also did their best to help her. But she was eventually taken to Moscow and then on to Yerevan, Armenia.
I understand that she is now in what is regarded as a place of safety, along with her five-year-old daughter,
Elen. A single British friend is in touch with her, and she says that
Gina is "extremely grateful" for the support shown by so many people.
It certainly was heartening to witness the sudden explosion of interest after I was informed that
Gina - described as "an Armenian journalist" - was about to be returned to a country she fled four years ago after apparently falling foul of the authorities for revealing electoral fraud. However, it would be remiss of me not to mention that there have been questions raised about
Gina's story.
For example, an Armenian blogger, uzogh, decided to check details in Gina's statements and couldn't find anyone in Yerevan to corroborate her story. She has claimed to have been detained for 40 days after exposing electoral fraud while working as a media assistant to an opposition candidate,
Suren Abrahamian, in the Erebuni constituency in Yerevan, during the May 2003 parliamentary elections. She also said she had previously worked as a TV journalist - for
H1, Channel 2 and
Mairakakhok TV - and as a newspaper journalist, for the titles
Aravot and
Yerkerot Alik.
Yet
uzogh's investigation drew a blank. He tells me that he was unable to find anyone at the
Yerevan press club or the
Investigative Journalists of Armenia who knew of her or the incident she described. Furthermore,
uzogh - whose real identity I know - asked people in the newsroom of Armenia's public TV company, where
Gina claims to have worked, and no-one there remembered her.
None of this is, of course, conclusive proof that
Gina has lied, but Armenian journalists - and journalists everywhere - will be unhappy if she has pretended to be a journalist in order to stay illegally in Britain. As one of her closest friends in Britain now concedes, "most of what
Gina has told people here appears to be a bending of the truth at best and pure fabrication at worst."
None of this was clear to any of the people who did so much last week to help
Gina, including
Mike Jempson, the director of
MediaWise, and
Toby Young, who generously agreed to pay her legal fees. Similarly,
Maltese journalists made a huge effort to help
Gina in the belief that she was a journalist facing recriminations if returned to Armenia.
The truth is that that was so little time to act after hearing about
Gina's detention that none of us had time to check her story. On the other hand, we still don't know the truth. The whole thing remains a mystery and shouldn't blind us to the problems facing all the people who seek exile in Britain.