Azernews.Az

By Vafa Ismayilova

One of the Armenian servicemen that Baku handed over to Yerevan on June 12 in exchange for mine maps for liberated Aghdam region has hailed his detention conditions in Azerbaijan.

In an interview with the Armenian media, former Armenian detainee Erik Khachatryan said: "The attitude [towards us] was normal, my friend and I even read books."

Khachatryan and his comrades hid in Hadrut before being detained.

"We were on the roof, they (Azerbaijani servicemen - editorial note) climbed up and saw us. They detained us and immediately took to Baku," he said.

Everyone whom he had contacted during the detention in Azerbaijan is already in Armenia. Khachatryan said that on the morning of June 12, he was told about his return to Armenia.

On June 12, 2021, Armenia handed over minefield maps to Azerbaijan, where the location of 97,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the Aghdam region was recorded. In exchange for these documents, Azerbaijan, showing humanism, agreed to hand over 15 previously detained Armenian servicemen to Armenia. The exchange took place at the Azerbaijani-Georgian border with the participation of Georgian officials.

Earlier, during the ongoing trial of Armenian war criminals Ludvik (Ludwig) Mkrtichyan and Alyosha Khosrovyan, who have been arrested on charges of torturing Azerbaijani captives during the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s, a group of former Azerbaijani POWs testified that they had been severely tortured by the Armenians in captivity. Later they unveiled new details about the extreme physical pain inflicted on them.

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