Former Karabakh resident tells court of expulsion from region at start of conflict

The Baku Military Court examined documents on the events of the first years of the Karabakh conflict during the trial of the former leaders of the unrecognized republic. The victim Zenfira Abbasova said that the Azerbaijanis were threatened, and in the fall of 1988 her house was destroyed.

As "Kavkazsky Uzel" reported, the Baku Military Court is considering the criminal case of 15 former leaders and residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. They have been charged under more than 20 articles, and the case contains 2,548 episodes. In July, the victims spoke at the hearings - they told how they were captured by the Armenian military and tortured. At the hearing on August 28, three former presidents of the unrecognized republic told the court that all orders and instructions regarding military operations against Azerbaijan in different years came to them from Yerevan.

The trial of the former leaders of the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh continued in the Baku Military Court on September 8.

The victim in the case, Zenfira Abbasova, told the court that she lived with her two sons in the city of Khankendi. According to the victim, in 1988 they were subjected to daily threats from neighbors who spoke under the slogan “Down with Azerbaijan, long live the Armenian people.” She named one of them by name - Slavik Hayrapetyan. After repeated insults, threats and demands to leave the place of residence, Abbasova's house was destroyed on September 18, 1988, writes Report.

Most of the meeting was devoted to studying documents on events related to the first years of the Karabakh conflict - in particular, mass riots in Shusha, Khankendi and Khojaly on September 18-19, 1988, when Abbasova's house was destroyed. Evidence of the first armed incidents related to the conflict was reviewed - among them the shooting of a GAZ-21 car belonging to Azerbaijanis in February of the same year. Some of the police reports reviewed testified to the storage of weapons and explosives by Armenian residents.

In one of the documents read out, witness Yuri Jahangiryan names Robert Kocharyan, who at that time was the party organizer at the Karabakh silk factory, as one of the main propagandists of national discord and hostility against Azerbaijanis. The witness noted that Kocharyan “intimidated Azerbaijani employees at their place of work, insulted them, sought their dismissal and demanded that other Armenian managers of the factory do the same,” AzerTaj reports.

Other documents studied concerned the explosion of the Khankendi-Shusha highway bridge on October 7, 1989, the explosion of a passenger bus on the Yevlakh-Lachin highway on February 18, 1990, the murder of an Azerbaijani minor near a school in the Hadrut region, an assassination attempt on a policeman, the wounding and murder of a number of Azerbaijani residents of Karabakh and other incidents.

At the previous hearing on September 5, the reading of the testimony given by the defendants during the preliminary investigation was completed, after which all the defendants voiced their attitude to the testimony given: some of them confirmed the pre-trial testimony in full, others only partially, asking to use their testimony given in court as a basis. The next meeting is scheduled for September 11.

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