lieutenant, during a NATO course in Budapest, two years ago.
The murder case brought to the doorstep of Hungary a bloody conflict between predominantly Christian Armenia and its mainly Muslim neighbor Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, in which more than 25,000 people died.
Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov, when he was 27, used an ax to hack to death his sleeping Armenian colleague Gurgen Markarian, 26, in the dormitory of Hungary’s Miklos Zrinyi National Defense University, where both men attended a three-month English language course under the NATO Partnership for Peace program.
Safarov, now 29 and an Azerbaijani army lieutenant, said the murder was in revenge for a 1992 "Armenian assault" in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, which he witnessed as a child.
The officer claimed he had been provoked by what he called "the insulting behavior" of Lieutenant Markarian towards the Azerbaijani flag. He also said Armenians in the dormitory "were smiling mockingly and were behaving the way members of a victorious army usually behave towards the defeated."
"UNUSUALLY CRUEL"
But Judge Andras Vaskuti of the Budapest district court ruled that Safarov killed Markarian in a "premeditated, malicious and an unusually cruel" way by nearly decapitating him with an axe while the victim was sleeping.
Safarov was also found guilty of planning the murder of another Armenian, which he did not carry out.
"The crime was convicted in a malicious way because (Safarov) murdered the victim solely because of his Armenian origin," Vaskuti said, as he detailed how Safarov had also stubbed out a lit cigarette on the victim’s body after committing the crime.
Safarov will be eligible for parole in 30 years, according to the ruling. Defense lawyers launched an appeal immediately after the verdict was read out, and Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense said it would pay for expenses.
"UNFAIR VERDICT"
"The Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan does not agree to the unfair verdict passed on Azerbaijani army officer Rami Safarov for murdering Armenian army officer Gurgen Markarian in Hungary," the spokesman for the Defense Ministry Ilgar Verdiyev told the Azeri-Press Information Agency (APA).
Azeri authorities have also said that several of the defendant’s relatives were killed and his family had to flee its home in the city of Jebrail when it was taken by Armenian forces. They allegedly live in squalid conditions in a student dormitory in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, where dozens of nationalists protested against the sentence Friday, April 14.
"Ramil Safarov is the officer of the Defense Ministry. We’ll take necessary steps to defend our officer, to commute the unfair verdict on him," Verdiyev was quoted as saying adding that "the Ministry will defray all expenses for legal defense of Ramil Safarov."
But a lawyer representing the victim’s family reportedly welcomed the sentence as a "good decision for the Hungarian court and for [Armenian] society".
WIDESPREAD PERSECUTION
The case underscored what human rights watchers describe as widespread persecution of Christian Armenians in Azerbaijan, including the arrest of evangelical Christians and the raiding of churches by security forces.
Earlier this year investigators also accused the government of Azerbaijan of destroying an "irreplaceable" medieval Armenian Christian cemetery in the Djulfa region of the country’s Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.
Washington-based International Christian Concern (ICC), claimed "the act of cultural cleansing" resembled the spirit of the Armenian Genocide, which it called "an attempt by Muslim countries in the region to erase all memory of a thriving Christian culture that existed in the Caucasus area since the fourth century."
Tensions are rising as despite a 1994 cease-fire, Azerbaijan has yet to resolve its conflict with Armenia over the Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh enclave which is largely Armenian populated, analysts say. Azerbaijan has lost about 16% of its territory according to US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimates. Over half a million people are believed to be internally displaced. (With BosNewsLife’s Agnes R. Bos, BosNewsLife News Center, BosNewsLife Research and reports from Baku).
