AXE-MURDER AZERBAIJANI SOLDIER SENTENCED TO LIFE IN HUNGARY
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
April 13, 2006, Thursday
16:55:07 Central European Time
An Azerbaijani soldier who brutally murdered an Armenian lieutenant
with an axe during a NATO Partnership for Peace training course in
Budapest was sentenced to life imprisonment Thursday.
Lieutenant Ramil Safarov, 29, was convicted of killing Armenian
Lieutenant Gurgen Markarian, 26, with an axe and a knife in 2004.
Budapest District Court Judge Andras Vaskuti ruled that Safarov killed
his victim in a “premeditated, malicious and cruel” manner.
Safarov hacked Markarian to death with a knife and an axe in the
early hours of the morning while he slept in the same room as a
Hungarian soldier.
A policeman at the time said the murder had been committed with
unusual cruelty, saying that “besides the knife wounds to his chest,
the victim’s head was practically severed from his body.”
Safarov, who was also convicted of planning the murder of a second
Armenian officer, is expected to be eligible for parole in 30 years.
Witnesses at the time said there had been no arguments between the
men, but relations between the two former Soviet Republics were tense
after Armenian-backed forces drove Azerbaijan’s army out of the ethnic
Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.