STERN CRIME No.55, June/July 2024 (page200 to 208)

THE PRECIOUS STONES OF BOURJ HAMMOUD

by JAN RÜBEL

photos FRANK SCHULTZE

On this dark afternoon in the Viennese spring of 2024, a single shop’s window sparkles in the street, with its diamonds, rubies and gold in the display - like an island in a ​​gray sea. In the room behind the window, a man can be seen through the pane, leaning over his table, engrossed in a catalog. His white ring of hair around his bald head shines in the warm ceiling light. Nothing moves. Only silhouettes are reflected in the glass, of passers-by walking wearily against the wind. The quiet idyll seems to have nothing to do with that very contrasting April 13th 39 years ago, when the sun was burning and the same man in a distant country was squeezing along the apartment walls on General DeGaulle Street, looking around nervously again and again. "We noticed a person on the opposite sidewalk with unusual movements," wrote Beirut police lieutenant Samir Rahma in his 1985 report, "he tried to move away - which made us suspect that it was the man we were looking for." The man began to run, the officers followed, "he was warned several times to stop," says the Lebanese police report. "I fired twice with my Amiri pistol, then he stopped." Today, around four decades later, the man opens the door of his jewelry store in a prime location from his table with the push of a button. He nods friendly. What, Mr Nahabedian, was going on back then - and what is he doing here in Vienna, 2250 kilometers away? "That," he answers quickly, "you'd better discuss with my lawyer." And he wishes for a nice day.

This story is about a crime without punishment. Panos Nahabedian was 27 years old when he was arrested by the Beirut police lieutenant. His brother Raffi, 23, who had been arrested earlier, had told investigators that they wanted to meet at an amusement park not far from De Gaulle Street - and that their younger brother Hratch, 20, had already fled to Cyprus. The three were suspected of a robbery and  murdering 5 persons, with loot totaling 1.15 million US dollars, which is equivalent to 3.3 million dollars today. "The biggest robbery in the history of Lebanon," was the headline of the daily newspaper "L'Orient-Le Jour."

In this story, we know who committed it, why and how. But we don’t know if it will end or not with justice. Because the three murderers did not have to atone for their crimes. They took different names and started a different life. But it's still a life about jewels - like the ones they stole in Beirut on March 28, 1985.

On the afternoon of that Lebanese spring day, the driver of the jeweler Robert Boghossian was surprised by the locked door in front of which he was standing. He was supposed to deliver packages to the Middle East Diamond Company, which his boss and his partner Hrant Kurkdjian had founded in 1966 and

led into a thriving jewelry business. The company's workshop supported dozens of families as assistants in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter in east Beirut. Actually, the driver thought  his colleagues should still be at work. He rang the neighbor's doorbell. She let her 10 year old son  jump from the balcony to the workshop porch next door - so he could look in. He shouted that he saw “two men sleeping on the floor," the driver later said according to the police report. The officers were alerted. When they broke down the door, "we saw a man bent over a desk, around 60, with a lot of blood under him." Next to him was another man lying on his stomach, "blood under his head." A telephone with the receiver lying next to the hook, red splashes on the walls.

Five people, all shot: the employee Hani Zammar, 28, father of three children under the age of five; his colleague Avedik Boyadjian, 60; the cashier Maria Mikhaël, 32; the accountant Khatoun Tekeyan, 27. And the 60-year-old co-owner Hrant Kurkdjian, his tie still properly tied, next to him an open and empty iron safe.

The murder in the Armenian quarter shook the Lebanese capital, although violence was part of everyday life at the time. The civil war had been going on for ten years, with political movements and religious groups fighting each other like ancient tribes, and militias alternating between friend and foe. The newspapers reported for days. The dismay was great. The police of the collapsing state were under pressure from all sides to find and punish the culprits. The investigators set to work in a state of war, the police report notes at one point: "We drove on towards the museum, where the situation was tense, and the highway was under fire from snipers and some rocket-propelled grenades. We paid no attention and drove on to Baabda." They not only hunted the perpetrators, but also a loot of 3.1 kilograms of gold, 495 grams of diamonds, precious stones worth 700,000 dollars and 3,244 dollars in cash.

"To ensure the long-term survival of our brand," the Viennese jeweler's website now states, "we have to draw new things from the past every day." The man, who used to be called Panos Nahabedian, is in the shop almost every day, but his daughter runs the business. "We are proud of our high jewellery collection and know from experience that these pieces of jewellery are passed down from generation to generation and thus write their own history."

The jewellery from the Beirut robbery, on the other hand, came to an abrupt end: gold chains were melted down and precious stones were extracted. The raw material from the loot was intended to enable the three Nahabedian brothers, who were also Armenians, to start a new life. But the police were getting closer to them. Panos' father-in-law contacted them giving a tip. During a house search, the investigators found parts of the loot in the bathroom of Raffi's apartment. During the previous interrogation, he had still claimed to be innocent: "I don't kill. I read the Bible. I don't know anything, I don't know anything, I don't know anything."

But he now collapsed under the burden of proof. "Our debts became too great because of the price of the dollar," he said. "We decided to rob Hrant's workshop." Raffi and Panos knew the Middle East Diamond Company well, having worked for them as jewelers for three years. On March 28, 1985, they went to the workshop with their younger brother Hratch, unmasked, and were immediately let in through the electronically secured door. "Hrant said to me: 'Raffi, what are you doing?” – “Give us something and everything will be OK.'" He then went into the vault with Hrant. There he heard the accountant Khatoun screaming in the other room and then muffled shots. "I continued to empty the safe into nylon bags." Then he immediately went out. "My two brothers carried out the operation." A few hours after this statement, the officials arrested the eldest brother Panos at the amusement park.

And they sent a telegram to their Cypriot colleagues, who arrested the youngest, Hratch, in a hotel in Limassol.

Panos and Hratch later incriminated each other. "Panos doesn't like me," Hratch told the investigators, "he often called me an idiot and didn't give me his car." When the officers confronted the two, a clash ensued. "You led the owner into the interior room and killed him," Hratch shouted, "and then I was supposed to take Hani there too, but then you took him by the hand and shot him." Panos replied: "Hratch, it was you who shot. Not me." The police then brought Raffi into the interrogation room.

"You are my brother," he said to Hratch, crying. "But Panos is my brother too." And later: "I don't know." All three remained in custody.

Thirteen days later, they changed their statements after receiving family visits. "I approached the girls with the gun in my right hand behind my back, but one of them started screaming," Hratch now said. "I got scared and shot them. Then Raffi came in and asked: 'What's going on?' I don't remember what happened after that."

The pretrial detention in the notorious and heavily guarded Roumieh central prison dragged on. The start of the trial was delayed not least by the chaos of the final years of the civil war. In the third year, on March 5, 1988, the bars of the brothers' cell had been sawn through and the guards found knotted sheets and bed covers. Panos, Raffi and Hratch Nahabedian had disappeared. Whether anyone had helped them remained a mystery. They had passed the checkpoints of the embattled city and left no trace. Part of the loot also remained missing, diamonds with an estimated value of almost $300,000. Their crime left 14 relatives of victims behind, and the loss became part of their everyday life. Pain was packed away and forgetting was practiced.

The civil war ended in 1990, and in 1994 judges sentenced the three brothers to death in absentia for joint murder, which was commuted to life imprisonment following a general amnesty in 1991. Rumors began to circulate in Beirut that Panos had died of cancer. "I tried to imagine that they were half-starving somewhere in Afghanistan," says Annie Kurkdjian, 52, on the phone today. She was twelve when her father Hrant was taken from her. The jeweler's daughter began painting then; the brushstrokes, the shapes and colors on the canvas transported her to a lighter, better world. She became an artist.

This fragile balance was interrupted on the morning of September 21, 2013 by a call that woke her up. A friend was  asking if she wanted to meet for lunch; an acquaintance of his was visiting Beirut. When the three of them sat down in the restaurant “The Chase” on Sassine square, this acquaintance leaned forward: “I know where your father’s murderers are.” Her friend had guided the acquaintance through Bourj Hammoud that morning, showing him the building of the abandoned Middle East Diamond Company and telling him the story of the robbery. The acquaintance flinched. “Eight years ago I was in Vienna and visited a friend,” he now told Annie Kurkdjian at lunch, "we also stopped by an Armenian jeweler, had coffee, he was very nice." But then outside, the friend told him that there was a dark story circulating about this jeweler, there were rumors of blood on his hands, and a robbery in Beirut.

The next night, Annie Kurkdjian could not sleep. "I thought this story was a mistake. I couldn't believe it was true." But the story disintegrated the fragile cocoon of security that had wrapped up her traumatic memories; in the family, talking about the crime was taboo. "I had come to terms with the injustice. But with the new key,  a restlessness rose up in me. Every night an inner voice spoke up, saying: Do something!"

A few days after this lunch, she sat down at the computer. She had no name, not even of the Viennese jeweler's, no address except: 1010 Vienna. And the three brothers would certainly no longer be called Nahabedian, she was sure of that. On Facebook, she typed in "Nahabedian" and "Vienna" anyway. The result was the account of a young adult man with that last name. Perhaps a relative of the brothers? Annie Kurkdjian got started. She opened a fake account on Facebook and saw that the young man's mother was showing all the photos openly;  Kurkdjian called herself “Annabel Lee” after Edgar Allan Poe's poem, and started searching in the photos. She began to create a picture: not an oil on canvas this time, but a panopticon of a widely branched family network.

Then, exactly one year later, on September 21, 2014, she saw a girl in a photo on this network - and behind her the half face of a man; from the thick eyebrows she recognized Hratch Nahabedian, the youngest of the brothers. She soon found out the man's current name.

Annie Kurkdjian went to the Austrian embassy in Beirut in 2015, and a diplomat cabled the Vienna public prosecutor's office.  Kurkdjian had meanwhile worked on an arrest warrant of Interpol for Hratch.

The Austrian prosecutors had the Nahabedians' fingerprints sent to them. In 2016, police officers visited the man Kurkdjian had identified and took his fingerprints - without giving the exact reason for doing so. Only: They did not match.

The story could have ended at this point. The Viennese authorities declared the matter closed. But for Annie Kurkdjian, it was not. She flew to Vienna herself and visited around 30 lawyers, but they all turned her down - a lost case, or so it seemed to them. The last person she asked was Norbert Haslhofer.

In the spring of 2024, Haslhofer, 58, tall, smiling eyes, rimless glasses, sits enthroned in his Vienna office behind a desk in mighty baroque, the second piece by a carpenter who had built the original for a French castle. "It was 2016," the lawyer recalls, "this artist from Lebanon came with a 50-page collected file. I promised her I would look at it. And what I read sounded like more to me." Two days later, he had also tracked down Panos Nahabedian. In 1998, he founded a company in partnership with Hratch. Panos also now had a different first and last name. The lawyer noticed that in official documents, his new first name was always accompanied by the middle name Asdghik. Annie, in turn, found the obituary of another man with Panos' new last name during an archive search in Lebanon - it was the father of Panos' wife. In the obituary she came across another daughter of the deceased: Asdghik. Panos had apparently entered Austria in 1988 with her passport; the authorities did not notice that Asdghik was a woman's name.

Haslhofer, who had previously worked as a criminal judge and public prosecutor, found something else: from an older Facebook post he read how a boy from the Nahebidians' circle was mourning his uncle - and that he had been taken to the morgue.

Haslhofer searched Vienna's cemeteries for three days; he suspected that the dead man was Raffi Nahabedian. He was unsuccessful in the Armenian cemetery, but in the Protestant cemetery on Triester Strasse, after walking endlessly through the dozens of rows of graves, he came across a stone that aroused his interest: "Harout Dayan Nahabedian" was engraved, and: "1962-2012". Next to it was a photo that looked familiar to him from Facebook.

Raffi was found. He was registered as Harout Dayan, the date of birth in his passport was ten years in advance of his real date, but the correct date was on the gravestone.

The three brothers became Austrian citizens in 1993. They worked as jewelers. The rich and beautiful shop was founded by Panos. Beyoncé and Melanie Griffith were among the customers, and in February 2024 the Austrian star violinist Lidia Baich bought from the shop a necklace for the opera ball, as the daily newspaper "Kurier" immediately reported.

When lawyer Haslhofer filed criminal charges against the two brothers who were still alive in 2017, the authorities reacted angrily. "I was accused of trying to defraud the justice system," he sums up. "After all, there was the negative fingerprint check from the previous year." But the public prosecutor's office had the fingerprints sent from Beirut again. This time they matched. There had probably been a mix-up during the first comparison in 2016.

But Hratch could not be prosecuted. At the time of the crime, he was younger than 21 years old, and Austrian criminal law provides for a statute of limitations of 20 years for murder, which began with the final conclusion of the proceedings in Lebanon in 1995 and ended in 2015.

"Austria is primarily responsible for prosecuting crimes committed by Austrian citizens abroad," is the answer from the Ministry of Justice to a request for this article. Although Hratch and Panos have since been stripped of their citizenship because of the false statements they made when entering the country, when "this search was received," according to the ministry, they were still Austrian. That counts. And: "Lebanon was therefore asked for legal assistance for the domestic proceedings and never made a formal extradition request."

Since 2017, the Vienna public prosecutor's office has been examining under the reference number 406 St 35/17y whether to bring charges against Panos Nahabedian on suspicion of murder and robbery.

"It would be a very special case," says Haslhofer. "A five-fold robbery-murder, not happened here, no witnesses - and the police officers from back then are deceased or retired."

The only basis for the Vienna prosecutors are the 1,200 pages of court files from Lebanon. The documents had to be searched for in Beirut, some archives had been damaged over time by fire or water damage. Then came the devastating explosion in Beirut harbor in the summer of 2020. Finally, the corona pandemic. The files only reached Vienna in 2021, but the translator took his time. He asked for a delay several times and eventually lost his laptop, as he said. The documents have been available in German since the beginning of the year.

Panos Nahabedian remains silent on all this. His lawyer Klaus Ainedter says on the phone: "I can't say anything about it because the proceedings are still ongoing." Nina Bussek, spokeswoman for the public prosecutor's office, rarely answers emails or calls; and when she does, she simply says: "The investigation is still ongoing." And Hratch Nahabedian hangs up the phone after a few seconds, saying: "I'm not interested in this story." Meanwhile, Annie Kurkdjian from Beirut says: "My family hereby calls on the cemetery to remove the cross on Raffi's gravestone. It is next to a false name." And of course the question arises as to why it took so long for the case to be brought to the attention of Austria. Why did it take a chance meeting between a painter and the daughter of a victim to bring the unpunished crime to the public. There had been rumors about the brothers in Vienna for a long time. Anyone who asks questions in their circle today, however, receives little response. A distant relative is dismayed. "This is the first time I've heard this, I can't believe it," he says. "I think I need a shot of alcohol." But he doesn't want to comment on the case. The brothers do not live in isolation in Vienna. There are between 6,000 and 7,000 Armenians living in Austria, most of them in the capital and its surrounding areas. And social media documents how closely the Nahabedians were embedded in Armenian community life, even if they have since withdrawn.

In the two Armenian congregations, some people are willing to talk about the brothers. Yes, they know them, but they haven't been seen for a long time. No one wants to be quoted. Everyone quickly changes the subject. After all, Jesus said: I have not come to judge the world, but to save it. The question remains as to where there is room for the victims in this picture.

Shortly before 7:30 in the morning, the door to the Church of “the Protection of Mary” of the Mekhitarists, at number 4, Mechitaristengasse in Vienna's seventh district opens.

Five women who have come to the morning mass are seen in the dark hall. Squeezed between two old buildings, everyone flees upstairs. It smells like incense. A priest stands at the front with his back to the believers. "But when it is sown, it grows," he quotes from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 4. The rust-red walls are decorated with fine gold lines, the poinsettia flowers on the altar are blood red. In this church, Jesus is only seen on the cross. The front pillars show frescoes of men carrying battle axes and swords.

The interior is a declination of suffering and violence. After the mass, Father Vahan Hovagimian invites us to talk in the adjoining monastery wing. Yes, he says, he knows the jeweler, who used to be called Panos Nahabedian. The priest is wearing a coat; the monastery room is not heated in the cold, damp spring.

"It was discussed in the community in secret, but as priests we do not interfere in private matters."

Why did they not investigate the rumors?

"There are so many crimes. We should have been sure, first, to contact the police."

But wouldn't it have been better at least to investigate?

"Many things would have been better. For example, it would have been better if there had been no First and Second World Wars."

What may sound cynical at first glance has a serious background. Towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, between 300,000 and 1.5 million Armenianse died in the massacres of 1915. The Beirut district of Bourj Hammoud, where the robbery later took place, was founded by survivors of this genocide. The Armenians had learned in the diaspora to form a close community. They stick together. They pay attention to discretion, seek what unites and avoid what divides.

This may also be one of the reasons why this case was able to remain hidden for so long. Even in the spring of 2024 in Vienna, the convicted murderers remain unpunished. Panos Nahabedian has, perhaps in response to the reporter's visit, secured his shop more tightly; a man stands guard at the entrance and two security guards stop by more often. His brother Hratch no longer answers the phone. And Raffi, the third convicted murderer, lies in a grave in Vienna, with ten cherub figures standing around the stone as if they were guarding it. The rooms of the Middle East Company in Bourj Hammoud have long since been inhabited again - by the boy who jumped over from the balcony on March 28, 1985.

There are prayer books on the benches in the Mekhitarist Church in Vienna, with the words "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" on page two. Annie Kurkdjian paints.

View the original article in pdf (German)