“If I hadn't acted at that moment, neither I nor the children would have been alive now,” Ani Avetisian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service days after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian rebuked her for taking on the armed intruder.
Avetisian rushed to her family’s house in Shaki, a village in the Syunik province, after being alerted about the intrusion by one of the teenage children. She confirmed her sister’s assertion that the Azerbaijani serviceman, Nasimi Musayev, held them at gunpoint.
“I stepped forward, he saw me, pointed [his assault rifle] at me, fired a shot and missed,” the 39-year-old said, speaking from her hospital bed. “I stepped further forward … He pointed the gun at my son to shoot him. I pulled it away with my hand which got injured [by a second shot.]”
“Then he threw me onto the bed and started hitting me,” she went on. “That’s when I started fighting back. I told my daughter to go open the gate. I tried to get my son out too, but he wouldn't leave. At that point, [Musayev] pointed the gun at my chest, intending to shoot, but I forcefully pushed the weapon down, and [a third gunshot] hit my foot.”
A wounded Avetisian managed to stab Musayev with a kitchen knife before he fled the house and was caught shortly afterwards. She lost one of her fingers and needs to undergo more surgeries on her fractured foot in a hospital in Yerevan.
Pashinian downplayed the armed attack an ordinary “criminal incident” on October 7. He also effectively blamed Avetisian for the gunfire, saying that she should have waited for police to arrive at the scene instead of taking on the armed soldier.
Avetisian countered that although she called the local police just before rushing to Shaki from the nearby town of Sisian, police officers arrived in her house at least five minutes after Musayev fled it. Sisian’s police station is closer to Shaki than a local hotel where she heard about the intrusion, added the woman hailed by many in Armenia as a hero.
Pashinian’s remarks caused outrage among opposition leaders and other critics of the Armenian government, who portray the incident as further proof that it has failed to secure the country’s border with Azerbaijan. Shaki is located at least 20 kilometers away from the nearest section of the long border.
According to Azerbaijani authorities, Musayev deserted his military unit deployed on the Armenian border on September 26. Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) claimed to have been notified by them about his disappearance on September 29. Like many government critics, Avetisian decried the NSS’s failure to issue security alerts to residents of Shaki and other local communities.
“Had they warned us, I would not have sent the kids to school and we would not have stayed in Shaki,” she said.