The 58-year-old Karen Avanesian was arrested by Azerbaijani security services on September 14 during Aliyev’s visit to Stepanakert. They claimed that he opened fire from an automatic assault rifle and threw hand grenades while approaching the site of an event attended by Aliyev.
The authorities released what they called video evidence of Avanesian’s preparations for the attack. The footage shot in Stepanakert showed the Karabakh Armenian man walking not towards that site but in the opposite direction. Nor did he carry any weapons.
A court in the Azerbaijani city of Gyanja convicted Avanesian on eight counts and handed down the lengthy jail sentence on Thursday at the end of a trial not attended by independent media or monitors.
Human rights lawyers in Armenia have condemned the trial as a travesty of justice. Citing Karabakh’s former health authorities, they argue that Avanesian suffers from a serious mental disease and should not have been put on trial in the first place.
“He was treated in Karabakh, there is medical information about him,” said Ara Ghazarian, one of the lawyers who recently appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in connection with Avanesian’s arrest and prosecution.
Medical records on Avanesian’s condition were transported to Armenia and handed over to the country’s Health Ministry during the 2023 exodus of Karabakh’s population. Ghazarian and the other plaintiffs have tried unsuccessfully to obtain and share them with the Strasbourg court. The ministry says that it cannot give them a copy of that document without the jailed patient’s consent.
Anna Melikian, a Yerevan-based human rights activist, dismissed the official explanation on Wednesday. She suggested that the Armenian government is simply reluctant to challenge Aliyev’s regime on the international stage.
Avanesian’s arrest raised to 24 the number of Armenian prisoners known to be held in Azerbaijan. Among them are other ordinary Karabakh Armenian civilians such as Vagif Khachatrian. He was arrested by Azerbaijani security services in July 2023 as he was escorted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenian hospitals for urgent treatment.
Khachatrian was subsequently tried and sentenced by an Azerbaijani military court to 15 years in prison for allegedly killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani residents during the 1991-1994 Armenian-Azerbaijani war. He denied the accusations during his trial. The 70-year-old was reportedly hospitalized on Monday after what the Azerbaijani Justice Ministry described as a sharp deterioration of his health.