Armenian law-enforcement authorities did not arrest and transfer them to the country’s prisons or detention centers. They now claim to be unaware of the whereabouts of these Karabakh Armenians. Six of them had been charged with spying for Azerbaijan.
Karabakh’s sole prison is located in the town of Shushi (Shusha) captured by the Azerbaijani army at the end of the 2020 war. Its inmates were transported to Armenian prisons after the six-week war. The same was also true for subsequently arrested Karabakh suspects.
Such transfers became impossible when Baku blocked the Lachin corridor last December, forcing the authorities in Stepanakert to open a makeshift detention center. According to a senior Karabakh law-enforcement official who has also taken refuge in Yerevan, the facility housed one man convicted of theft and ten others accused of high treason and other crimes when the Azerbaijani offensive began on September 19.
The official said that the authorities set them free on September 28 at the height of exodus. “Keeping them locked up there was no longer right,” the official told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General declined to comment on the fate of these individuals and the six spy suspects in particular. It is thus not clear whether the Armenian authorities regard them as a national security threat and, if so, are keeping track of them and planning to take them into custody.