Vera Khachatryan speaks to reporters on July 31 in Yerevan
The daughter of a patient from Artsakh who on Saturday was detained while being evacuated to Armenia by the International Committee of the Red Cross said that Azerbaijani border guards threatened to use force against the ICRC worker accompanying him.
Azerbaijani forces detained 68-year-old Vagif Khachatryan on Saturday while he was being transported to Armenia by the ICRC. He was taken to Baku, where he was charged with “committing Genocide” in 1993.
A demonstration was held in front of the United Nations headquarters to protest Azerbaijan’s latest act of aggression. Among the participants was Khachatryan’s daughter, Vera, who has been living in Jermuk, Armenia since the 2020 war after losing her home in Kashatagh, Artsakh.
Vera Khachatryan said that her father was being transported to Armenia for an emergency heart operation.
Vagif Khachatryan at the Hakari checkpoint before being kidnapped by Azerbaijani guards on Jul. 29
“My sister was accompanying him [Vagif]. Everyone’s passports were checked at the Hakari Bridge checkpoint. When they took my father’s passport, they didn’t return it and told him to go inside to a doctor’s room for examination. Then they told him he had to go to another place for ten minutes,” said Vera Khachatryan, according to Armenpress.
“When my sister asked them not to take him away and when one of the ICRC representatives tried to intervene so that my father would not be taken away and instead be questioned on spot, they threatened to use force. And that’s how my dad was taken away to an unknown location. My father has been factually kidnapped,” Vera Khachatryan added.
She said that her mother, sisters and brothers all are living in Artsakh, adding that she was alone in Armenia. “This suffering is not only mine. Vagif Khachatryan is the personification of the entire Armenian nation,” Vera said.
The ICRC contacted Vera’s sister in Artsakh and informed her that Vagif was taken to a hospital in Baku. On Sunday the ICRC confirmed that they met Vagif upon his arrival in Baku.
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“The man was met by our delegates, one of whom is a medical doctor, and was given the possibility to contact his family,” the ICRC said in a social media post on Sunday.
Vera Khachatryan said that the charges brought against her father by Azerbaijan’s leadership and prosecutors were categorically false.
She appealed to the United Nations to utilize its many “levers” to return her father home.
“My father is not a criminal, he has led a dignified life. No one has the right to call him a criminal,” Vera Khachatryan said.
In a message on Monday, Artsakh President Arayik Harutyunyan warned that the security and humanitarian situation in Artsakh was deteriorating on a daily basis, citing Khachatryan’s kidnapping as the latest example of Azerbaijan’s ongoing aggression and called on the international community to intensify its efforts.
