By Mark Dovich
A military court in Azerbaijan has sentenced Rashid Beglaryan, a 62-year-old Armenian man from Nagorno-Karabakh, to 15 years in prison, Azerbaijani state media reported Friday.
Beglaryan was found guilty of war crimes in connection with his participation in the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s, according to the APA news agency. It was not immediately clear if Beglaryan planned to appeal.
There was no immediate reaction to the news from Yerevan.
Beglaryan was detained last August during Azerbaijan’s near-total blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh after traveling by foot from the ethnic Armenian-controlled village of Hin Shen toward the nearby village of Aghavno, which was handed over to Azerbaijan the year prior. The exact circumstances of Beglaryan’s detention remain unclear.
Beglaryan’s sentencing marks only the second time Azerbaijan has found one of the dozens of Armenians in its custody guilty of war crimes.
Last November, judges handed Vagif Khachatryan, a 68-year-old Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian man, a 15-year prison sentence. Khachatryan was detained last July while attempting to leave Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia for medical treatment as part of a convoy belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross. A Baku appeals court upheld Khachatryan’s conviction in January.
Beglaryan and Khachatryan are among several dozen Armenians currently held in Azerbaijan. That includes eight former senior Nagorno-Karabakh officials, who were detained last September after Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive that led the local administration to collapse.
The resulting forcible displacement of nearly all of Nagorno-Karabakh’s roughly 100,000 Armenians “meet(s) the criteria for ethnic cleansing”, the U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House determined in a landmark report earlier this month.
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