A 29-year-old pregnant woman has died after being hit by a police car that reportedly accompanied the Armenian Prime Minister in Yerevan.

The police have stated that an on-duty officer was responsible for the accident on Tuesday evening; however, they refused to confirm or deny if the vehicle was part of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s motorcade.

The police officer driving the car initially left the scene following the accident but later returned and was arrested on the spot. Armenia’s Investigative Committee has filed charges against the officer.

The Committee later confirmed that the unnamed 29-year-old woman and her unborn child had died in the hospital; the woman was seven months pregnant.

The accident took place in the central Leo-Paronyan intersection of Yerevan.

Critics were quick to lambast what they described as the ‘reckless driving’ that Pashinyan’s convoy and its police escorts usually display.

‘Traffic police escorts have long been driving with unprecedented obscenity’, Daniel Ioannisyan, a democracy activist based in Yerevan, wrote on Facebook following the news of the woman’s death. 

‘All the policemen who have endangered people’s lives for these cases remain unpunished’, he added.

Armenians on social media also criticised the government for not living up to its pledge to lessen the number of cars owned by the state, a promise that the government seems to have reneged on, as official motorcades continue to throttle traffic.