Travel Agent Murder Trial Ends : Courts: Defense claims Armenian mafia framed rival. Prosecutors point to suspect’s fingerprints on weapon, other evidence.

Fingerprints on the murder weapon and at the scene of the crime prove that Garen Zakarian killed a travel agent for profit and he deserves to die for the crime, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday.

But Zakarian’s lawyer urged jurors to conclude that Benita Mikailian was killed by the Armenian Mafia, which then set his client up to take the blame.

The arguments came as jurors began deliberations in Zakarian’s trial in Pasadena Superior Court.

Zakarian, 30, is accused of the Oct. 5, 1994, shooting of Mikailian, who also was a Glendale travel agent. Prosecutors allege that Zakarian shot Mikailian in order to steal $42,000 worth of plane tickets from Paris to Los Angeles, which he desperately needed to avoid stranding 80 customers in Europe and to keep his struggling business alive.

Zakarian’s sister, Anait, was also charged with capital murder in the case, but she was mistakenly released from jail in July and has since vanished.

In closing arguments, defense attorney Malcolm Guleserian alleged that the evidence points not to Zakarian but to a man named Sisak Manukian, a former employee of Zakarian’s travel agency with ties to an organized crime ring that has infiltrated the air travel industry in Armenia.

Guleserian said he believes Manukian, who vanished shortly after the murder, was working for a ring of thugs allegedly trying to force Zakarian out of the travel business, and that he killed Mikailian and then planted evidence linking the crime to the defendant.

But in his rebuttal, prosecutor Sterling Norris called the defense case “silly” and “far-fetched.”

“Isn’t this guy so unlucky that on the very day that there’s all this confusion about how he got the [airline] tickets, that these murderers in their black cloaks and masks decided to murder Benita?” Norris said. “That is pure speculation. There is no proof of any of it.”

Mikailian, 42, was found dead of five gunshot wounds in her North Glendale office on the morning of Oct. 6, 1994. Zakarian was arrested the following day.

Anait Zakarian was arrested several days later, when a police officer saw her searching through bushes in front of a house where a homeowner had found a tote bag containing a semiautomatic handgun that later proved to be the murder weapon.

On the day of the murder, the Zakarian siblings sent two $21,000 checks to Mikailian to pay for the tickets, prosecutors say. Although they were travel agents, the Zakarians were not authorized by the Airline Reporting Corp. to print certain tickets and sometimes bought them through Mikailian.

According to testimony, Mikailian asked one of her employees to call the Zakarians’ bank, and learned there was only $8 in the checking account. Prosecutors contend Mikailian then locked the plane tickets in a box under her desk and refused to give them to the Zakarians.

Garen Zakarian, desperate to make sure the tickets were aboard a flight departing Los Angeles International Airport to Paris at 11 p.m., visited Mikailian, who was working overtime at her office, shot her and took what he thought to be the airline tickets from her desk, Norris said.

As key pieces of evidence, Norris presented three fingerprints at the trial: one on a silencer that was used with the murder weapon, another gleaned from the glass door to Mikailian’s office, and another from the stack of 80 airline documents taken from Mikailian’s office and shipped to Paris. All three fingerprints were Zakarian’s, according to testimony.

The documents turned out to be nonnegotiable “agent coupons” that resemble airline tickets, and which Zakarian mistakenly stole from Mikailian’s desk in his haste to make the 11 p.m. flight, Norris said.

Mikailian, a native of Iran, opened her travel agency in 1989 after working for Air France.

The Zakarian siblings opened their travel business with other family members in the early 1990s, specializing in affordable flights from Armenia to the U.S. During the trial, Guleserian contended that they offered cheaper fares than other, Mafia-run travel agencies operating in Armenia, which led to death threats and acts of violence against the family and culminated in a murder frame-up.