Deutsche Presse-Agentur
February 22, 2007 Thursday 2:12 PM EST

Hungarian court turns down Azerbaijani axe murderer appeal

Budapest

DPA x Hungary Justice Hungarian court turns down Azerbaijani axe
murderer appeal Budapest
A Budapest court Thursday rejected an Azerbaijani
soldier’s appeal against a life sentence for the 2004 axe murder of
an Armenian soldier at a NATO Partnership for Peace training course
in Budapest.

The appeal court ruled that the decision brought last April by
Budapest District Court against 30-year-old Lieutenant Ramil Safarov,
should stand.

Safarov was convicted of killing Armenian Lieutenant Gurgen
Markarian, 26 at the time of the murder, with an axe and a knife.

At the first trial, 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 another
soldier.

Safarov, whose attempt to murder a second Armenian officer was
foiled when he bumped into another classmate in the corridor after
the first killing, said he regretted his act.

"I didn’t go to his room to kill him. I don’t know how it
happened. I regret what I did," news website index.hu quoted Safarov
as saying after Thursday’s judgement.

Safarov’s lawyer claimed that his client was not in full
possession of his faculties at the time of the murder.

Relations between the two former Soviet Republics have been tense
since Armenian-backed forces drove Azerbaijan’s army out of the
ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.
Feb 2207 1412 GMT