Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
February 22, 2007 Thursday

AZERI MURDERER RECEIVES LIFE SENTENCE

Budapest, February 22 (MTI) – The Court of Appeal of Budapest on
Thursday confirmed an earlier sentence of life imprisonment for an
Azerbaijani officer who had murdered an Armenian classmate during a
NATO Partnership for Peace course in Budapest in 2004.

Ramil Safarov, when he was 27, used an ax to hack to death his
sleeping colleague Gurgen Markarian, 26, of Armenia, in the dormitory
of Miklos Zrinyi National Defence University, where both of them were
attending a three-month English-language course.

Earlier in the procedure, Safarov said the murder had been a revenge
for a 1992 Armenian assault of Azerbaijanis in the Nagorno-Karabakh
region, which he witnessed as a child. The Azerbaijani officer said
that the Armenians he had met in the dormitory "were smiling
mockingly and were behaving the way members of a victorious army
usually behave towards the defeated."

Safarov was charged with premeditated murder carried out with unusual
cruelty and vicious motives and sentenced to life in prison without
any chance of parole.