YEREVAN. – We must learn lessons from this incident. But on the other hand, the government, or the Minister of Health, cannot go and go around every day, see how it is. Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting of the interim government of Armenia, and referring to the improper preservation conditions of the bodies and remains of the Armenian casualties of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war last fall. He added that this is a matter of professional ethics and education.
"If we sum up the data, I want us to also record that at this moment, the work of DNA testing, identification of bodies has reached the final stage. We have bodies that have not been identified, but there are relatives who did not give a DNA sample for various reasons, and there are also bodies that the relatives did not take for various reasons," he said.
Pashinyan noted that there are about 50 remains in which case the DNA has not been separated even after the fourth or fifth attempts, and therefore they shall turn to foreign partners who are more experienced in this field for help. "There have been cases when relatives have questioned the datum of the examination conducted in Armenia, taken [it] abroad on their own initiative, and the results have been the same—by 99.9 percent," the acting premier added.