Agence France Presse — English
February 22, 2007 Thursday 2:15 PM GMT

Budapest court upholds life sentence for Azerbaijani officer

A Budapest court upheld a life sentence on Thursday against an
Azerbaijani military officer convicted of murdering an Armenian
lieutenant in Hungary in 2004, court spokesman Gyorgy Felkai told
AFP.

The murder had inflamed simmering ethnic tensions between Azerbaijan
and Armenia, two former Soviet republics fighting for control over
the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

"The appellate court upheld the life sentence handed down by the
first instance," Felkai said Thursday.

Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army lieutenant, used an axe to hack
Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Markarian to death in his sleep in the
dormitories of a NATO training centre in Budapest in 2004.

The two officers were enrolled in an English-language course in the
Hungarian capital as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s
Partnership for Peace programme, of which both Armenia and Azerbaijan
are members.

Safarov was also found guilty of planning the murder of another
Armenian, which he did not carry out.

He will be eligible for parole in 30 years.

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.

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.