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Sumgayit events masterminded by Armenians and foreign special services, investigator says

22 February 2018 08:04 (UTC +04:00)

The Sumgayit events were masterminded by Armenians and foreign special service agencies, said Nadir Mirzayev, a member of the investigative group set up in connection with the Sumgayit events and a senior investigator at the Prosecutor General’s Office.

He made the remarks Thursday at a press conference dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Sumgayit events, APA reports.

According to Mirzayev, the testimony of Azerbaijan’s law enforcement officers included in the investigative group of the USSR General Prosecutor's Office show that the investigation were mainly carried out by the USSR Prosecutor General's Office, as well as investigators invited from different provinces of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who came to the conclusion that the Sumgayit events had been organized by Armenians and foreign special service agencies.

"The investigative group leaders did not conduct any investigations to identify the clients and organizers of the crime and there was no interest in their disclosure, so they demanded that the criminal case on the main executers be quickly finalized and submitted to court. They tried to keep Azerbaijani investigators out of the investigation, so Azerbaijani investigators were mostly in charge of technical issues,” he said.

The investigation ascertained that although former members of security agencies had been discharged from the investigations concerning the Sumgayit events, their analysis showed that a diversion group consisting of 20—25 people and pretending to be “Azerbaijanis expelled from Gaphan” had been acting in the city, Mirzoyev said touching upon the diversion groups’ involvement in the Sumgayit events.

“Some suffered Armenians told them [investigators] about that. Even though the information had been submitted to operative-investigative group of USSR Prosecutor General’s Office, for some reason it wasn’t inspected and was gone fruitless. It was also determined that a group of persons was speaking on the meetings calling to expel Armenians from the city. The persons weren’t residents of Sumgayit and were speaking in Armenian among themselves,” Nadir Mirzayev said.

It was revealed that on the eve of the Sumgayit events a number of cars with Armenian registration numbers had been detected in the city. Moreover, many Armenian individuals had been staying in Baku and Sumgayit hotels and left out right after the events.

It was also determined that Armenians living in Sumgayit tried to provocatively burn down their homes and property and blame Azerbaijanis in that. The investigation ascertained that Armenians knew about the mass disorder in advance.

The day before the mass disorder special video filming equipment, tripods for video cameras etc., were installed on the rooftops of numerous buildings in different parts of Sumgayit. During the events, robbery of Armenians’ homes, as well as the actions of a naked woman in the street, was recorded with soviet servicemen’s consent by an individual, who presented himself as Armenian.

These facts prove that the mass disorder in Sumgayit was orchestrated by Armenian nationalists and sympathetic provokers from the Soviet government, the senior investigator said.