AZERBAIJANI OFFICER JAILED IN HUNGARY FOR BRUTAL KILLING OF ARMENIAN
Agence France Presse — English
April 13, 2006 Thursday 4:08 PM GMT
An Azerbaijani military officer who hacked to death an Armenian
lieutenant while attending a NATO-sponsored training course in Budapest
was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Judge Andras Vaskuti of the Budapest district court ruled that Ramil
Safarov, now 29 and an Azerbaijani army lieutenant, killed Armenian
Lieutenant Gurgen Markarian, 26, in a “premeditated, malicious and
an unusually cruel” way by nearly decapitating him with axe while
the victim was sleeping.
Safarov was also found guilty of planning the murder of another
Armenian, which he did not carry out.
“The crime was convicted in a malicious way because (Safarov) murdered
the victim solely because of his Armenian origin,” Vaskuti said,
as he detailed how Safarov had also stubbed out a lit cigarette on
the victim’s body after committing the crime.
Safarov will be eligible for parole in 30 years, according to the
ruling. Defence lawyers launched an appeal immediately after the
verdict was read out.
The brutal killing, which took place on February 19, 2004, inflamed
simmering ethnic tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia, two former
Soviet republics which are fighting over control of the disputed
region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia had attributed the murder to “anti-Armenian hysteria” fanned
by the Baku government, while Azerbaijani officials countered that
the killer was himself a refugee from the conflict with Armenia and
that the victim had taunted him over the conflict.
The two young officers had been studying on an English-language course
in the Hungarian capital as part of the NATO alliance’s Partnership
for Peace programme, of which both Armenia and Azerbaijan are members.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a six-year war over Karabakh that claimed
around 25,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
It ended in a tense ceasefire in 1994 with Armenian forces in control
of most of the enclave and seven surrounding regions, but Karabakh’s
status remains unresolved and tensions are still at boiling point.
Azeri authorities had said several of the defendant’s relatives were
killed and his family had to flee its home in the city of Jebrail when
it was taken by Armenian forces. They now live in squalid conditions
in a student dormitory in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.
Since the end of military hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh, all ties
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, neighbours in the volatile Caucasus
region, have been severed. The border is now a heavily-militarised
front line peppered with land mines.
For almost a decade, Western powers have been leading fruitless
efforts to tease out a peaceful solution to the Karabakh conflict,
but summits including the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents have
not led to progress.
Most recently, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said in March that
talks over the disputed region, hosted by French President Jacques
Chirac earlier this year, were at a “dead end” and signaled that the
oil-rich state should prepare for war.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
