U.S. authorities have unsealed an indictment against a Turkish-American activist charged with lying to congressional investigators regarding a trip by U.S. lawmakers to Azerbaijan five years ago.
The indictment, which was handed down in April, was released on September 24, more than three weeks after the Turkish-born man, Kemal Oksuz, was arrested in Armenia on a U.S. warrant.
Oksuz, a Houston-based businessman who used to run two organizations -- Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians and the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan -- was charged by the grand jury with lying on congressional disclosure forms regarding the 2013 all-expenses-paid visit to Azerbaijan made by 10 members and 32 staffers of Congress.
According to the five-count indictment, the trip was funded with the help by Azerbaijan's state-run SOCAR oil company, which provided $750,000 toward the effort.
Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General, said last week that it has received a formal extradition request from U.S. law-enforcement authorities.
Police in Yerevan arrested Oksuz on August 29 and released a video of his police interrogation the next day. In the video, Oksuz said that SOCAR covered the travel expenses of the U.S. officials and gave them expensive gifts in 2013.
"That may have been corruption, I don't know," he said.
It remains unclear why Oksuz decided to relocate to Armenia, a country that has strained relations with both Turkey and Azerbaijan. Just like other Turkish American activists, he had lobbied the U.S. Congress against recognizing the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
After U.S. news reports in 2015 raised questions about the funding of the trip, several of the U.S. lawmakers returned some of the gifts that they had received as part of the trip to Azerbaijan.
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