Azerbaijan: Armenian officer faces criminal charges

Gurgen Alaverdyan, the Armenian officer detained by Azeri militaries, was charged with espionage and waging an aggressive war.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on August 23, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defence (MoD) informed about a clash with saboteurs in the Karabakh conflict zone, where the above Armenian officer was taken prisoner of war. In its turn, the Armenian MoD asserts that Gurgen Alaverdyan is not a saboteur, but he got lost due to bad weather. It is possible that Azerbaijan will agree to exchange him and three other residents of Armenia for the Azeri ones kept in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, Avaz Gasanov, the head of the Society for Humanitarian Studies, and Telman Abilov, the head of the NGO "Military Officers", believe.

"In the course of the investigation, suspicions arose that Alaverdyan ... attacked militaries and organizations of Azerbaijan," the State Security Service (SSS) and the General Prosecutor's Office (GPO) of Azerbaijan have stated.

According to investigators, Alaverdyan, on the instructions of the Armenian special services, illegally crossed the border aiming to collect information constituting Azerbaijani state secrets. He could face life imprisonment.

Azad Isazade, an employee of the Institute for Peace and Democracy (IPD), has noted that the international humanitarian law allows the detention of prisoners of war, provided they are duly secured.

He has added that the practice of prisoners' exchange is widespread in the world. The parties to the conflict act on the basis of reciprocity or on the principle of "all for all". In recent years, Azerbaijan has offered an exchange on the principle of "all for all".