The reportedly unarmed soldier was spotted and apprehended by several men on a highway near Kapan, the administrative center of southeastern Syunik province. They handed him over to police.
“At first he claimed to be an Iranian. But he wore an Azerbaijani military uniform,” one of the men, Ara Sukiasian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We tied his hands and I told my wife to call the police so that they come and deal with him,” he said.
Law-enforcement authorities in Yerevan did not clarify whether the soldier is connected to another Azerbaijani serviceman who was detained on Monday in a Syunik village located about 100 kilometers northwest of Kapan. According to the Armenian military, the latter claimed to have crossed the Armenian border with Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave together with another soldier.
They deserted their army unit in Nakhichevan because of “being subjected to hazing and humiliation by other soldiers,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian claimed on Wednesday as the Armenian authorities continued looking for the other presumed fugitive.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry reported on Monday that two of its soldiers serving in Nakhichevan have done missing in heavy fog. It subsequently identified the conscripts as Akshin Bebirov and Huseyn Akhundov and asked international organizations to help repatriate them.
The Armenian authorities have still not released the identity of either soldier held by them in detention.
The second detention came one day after the killing of a security guard working for a Syunik-based mining company. The 56-year-old man was found shot dead outside a village located several kilometers from whether the second Azerbaijani was caught.
Another Syunik resident who apprehended him told News.am that the soldier possessed the murdered guard’s mobile phone. Sukiasian said, however, that he “did not see the phone.”
Rumors about the Azerbaijani soldier’s involvement in the murder intensified after the circulation later on Thursday of an Instagram video of seemingly the same soldier bragging about killing Armenians and saying at the same time that “we are not traitors of our fatherland.”
A spokesman for Armenia’s Investigative Committee said afterwards that the law-enforcement authorities not yet have any evidence that the detained soldier committed the murder.