Armenian security forces detained ASALA terrorist Hampig Sassounian, who assassinated Türkiye’s Consul General in Los Angeles over 40 years ago and was released on parole, for joining anti-government protests in Yerevan, reports said Tuesday.

The terrorist was escorted to a police vehicle, according to footage published on social media outlets.

Sassounian, an Armenian immigrant who was living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, was jailed in 1984 for opening fire on Consul General Kemal Arıkan after he stopped at a traffic light on Jan. 28, 1982. In 2002, Sassounian signed a declaration renouncing terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison and required to serve a minimum of 25 years. His application for parole had been repeatedly denied until a Los Angeles judge granted it in 2021.

Turkish authorities decried and condemned the U.S. decision to release the terrorist, saying it would "set a dangerous precedent that will only embolden violent extremists."

He arrived in Armenia shortly after his release in 2021.

The vast majority of the attacks on Turkish diplomats and citizens in the 1970s and 1980s were conducted by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), both designated as terrorist groups in the U.S. and Turkey. Sassounian belonged to the JCAG.

The assassinations took place in the United States, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Portugal, Iran and the United Kingdom.

At least 58 Turkish nationals, including 31 diplomats, were killed by Armenian terrorist groups, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Founded in 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Lebanese Civil War, ASALA is responsible for hundreds of bloody terrorist acts. While the Marxist-Leninist ASALA not only targeted Turkey but also other countries and became infamous for a 1975 bombing of the Beirut office of the World Council of Churches, the nationalistic JCAG has only targeted Turkey because it believed that attacking other countries would damage the so-called "Armenian struggle."

Armenian terrorist attacks intensified from 1980 to 1983, when 580 of the 699 attacks – over 80% – occurred. The attack at Esenboğa airport in the Turkish capital Ankara on Aug. 7, 1982, was one of the most notorious attacks by ASALA, as the group targeted civilians for the first time. Nine people died and over 80 were injured when two terrorists opened fire in a crowded passenger waiting area at the airport.

The 1981 and 1983 Paris attacks are among the group's other notable acts. ASALA terrorists held 56 people hostage for 15 hours during the Turkish Consulate attack in 1981, while a suitcase bomb killed eight people – most of them non-Turks – in 1983 at a Turkish Airlines check-in desk at Paris' Orly Airport. According to some Turkish officials, after the Orly attack, the group lost much of its support and financial backing from the Armenian diaspora and had to dissolve, but terrorist attacks continued to take place until mid-1990s, with the last one targeting diplomat Çağlar Yücel in Baghdad, Iraq, in December 1993.