An Azerbaijani man imprisoned in Nagorno-Karabakh on charges relating to the murder of an Armenian teenager has undergone urgent surgery at a hospital in Stepanakert, it emerged on Monday.
Shahbaz Quliyev’s Karabakh Armenian lawyer, Arkady Israelian, and local human rights activists said he has already been discharged from the hospital and sent back to prison.
“The operation was successful and he is fine now,” Karen Ohanjanian, head of the Stepanakert-based group Helsinki Initiative-92, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).
Ohanjanian said that Quliyev complained of abdominal pains when he recently visited the 46-year-old Azerbaijani prisoner. The latter was then examined by Karabakh doctors and diagnosed with chronic gallbladder disease that required surgery, he said.
Quliyev was one of three armed Azerbaijani men who secretly crossed last July into the formerly Azerbaijani-populated Kelbajar district sandwiched Armenia and the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. One of those men, Dilgam Askerov, and Quliyev were separately captured by Karabakh Armenian forces shortly afterwards.
The third Azerbaijani, Hasan Hasanov, was gunned down several days later after reportedly killing an Armenian army officer and gravely wounding a civilian woman.
The shootings were reported four days before Smbat Tsakanian, a 17-year-old Armenian resident of Kelbajar, was found dead near his family’s farm. The Karabakh authorities believe that he was kidnapped and killed by the Azerbaijani “saboteurs.”
Askerov was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment, while Quliyev received a 22-year prison sentence. A Karabakh court convicted them of illegal arms possession, espionage and kidnapping. Askerov was also found guilty of killing Tsakanian.
The defendants claimed to have had no part in the boy’s killing when they went on trial in Stepanakert in October. They both appealed against the verdict. It was upheld by a Karabakh appeals court in March, however.
The Azerbaijani government has denounced the trial as illegal and demanded the release of the two men. It says that that they had a legitimate right to visit what is an internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan that has been under Karabakh Armenian control since 1993. The authorities in Stepanakert have repeatedly ruled out the possibility of their early release.
Davit Babayan, the spokesman for Bako Sahakian, the Karabakh president, on Monday portrayed Quliyev’s surgery as further proof that the two Azerbaijanis have not been ill-treated by the Karabakh authorities. “Every prisoner has the right to medical treatment if their health is at risk,” he said. “This is natural.”
“Unlike the Azerbaijanis, we don’t kill healthy people or inject them with some substances,” Babayan added, alluding to recent years’ deaths of several Armenian civilians who accidentally crossed into Azerbaijan.