Azerbaijan hands 20-year jail terms to two more Armenian PoWs

PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenian prisoners of war Lyudvig Mkrtchyan and Alyosha Khosrovyan were sentenced to 20 years in prison by Azerbaijan on Monday, August 2.

In a grave violation of the international humanitarian law, Azerbaijan prosecuted Mkrtchyan and Khosrovyan and accused them of allegedly "torturing Azerbaijanis during the First Karabakh War."

According to a decision from the Baku military court, the two will spend the first 10 years in a prison, the rest in a maximum security correctional facility.

In July, an Azerbaijan court sentenced 39 Armenian prisoners of war to six years in prison, finding them guilty of "illegally crossing the border and weapons possession."

Earlier in July, Azerbaijan sentenced 14 members of Armenia’s armed forces to various jail terms, while Viken Euljekjian, an Armenian captive and a citizen of Lebanon, was handed a 20-year jail term in mid-June.

Azerbaijan is refusing to return all Armenian prisoners of war, in violation of the statement on the cessation of hostilities signed by the parties in November 2020. The Armenian side has information about some 200 Armenians still in Azerbaijan’s captivity, but Azeri President Ilham Aliyev claims that persons being kept in Baku are not PoWs, but “terrorists and saboteurs”. At least 19 of the hundreds of Armenian captives have been tortured and killed, according to their lawyers.