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ICRC visits Azerbaijanis held hostage by Armenia

30 January 2017 14:08 (UTC +04:00)

Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have visited Dilgam Asgarov and Shahbaz Guliyev who were taken hostage by Armenians in the occupied Kalbajar district of Azerbaijan.

The visit was made last week, Ilaha Huseynova, head of Communication Department of the ICRC Baku Office, told APA on Monday.

The Azerbaijanis held in Nagorno-Karabakh were delivered messages from their families and their families will be informed about their conditions.

In July of 2014, Russian citizen Dilgam Asgarov and Azerbaijani citizen Shahbaz Guliyev were taken hostage and another Azerbaijani citizen Hasan Hasanov was shot to death by the Armenian servicemen while trying to visit their homeland in Kalbajar.

Hasan Hasanov’s body was taken from the enemy and buried in Baku.

On December 19, 2014, an illegal court of the separatist regime created in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh sentenced Dilgam Asgarov to life imprisonment and Shahbaz Guliyev to 22 years in prison.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includesNagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam,Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCEMinsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the CSCE (OSCE after the Budapest summit held in Dec.1994) Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, the US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996.

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.