Azerbaijani victim: "Armenians shot my grandmother for saying our army would return" Zabil Safarov recounts war crimes in court / photo

A survivor of the 1993 Armenian offensive in the Karabakh's Kalbajar district has told a military court in Baku that his grandmother was killed in front of him for expressing hope that Azerbaijani forces would one day reclaim the occupied territory.

Zabil Safarov, testifying on May 8 at the Baku Military Court, recounted harrowing experiences during the occupation, stating that he was taken hostage by Armenian forces when they overran Kalbajar on April 4, 1993, Caliber.Az reports, citing local media.

Safarov described how his grandmother was shot dead after pleading not to be separated from him. “When the Armenians put me in a tank to take me away, my grandmother begged them: ‘Don’t separate me from the child!’ They ignored her,” he said. “They killed her for saying: ‘One day our army will reclaim these lands.’”

Safarov said he was then taken to the village of Vang in Kalbajar, where he and others were subjected to torture. He claimed that detainees, including minors, women, and the elderly, were mistreated and sometimes killed indiscriminately.

“The Armenians tortured a soldier with a heated skewer. They cut off another man's ear,” Safarov testified. “In the prison in Shusha, I saw a cross burned onto a prisoner’s skin. I witnessed the brutal beating of Azerbaijanis until death. They buried 23 people alive, leaving only their heads above ground.”

He also alleged that Armenian soldiers desecrated Azerbaijani cemeteries, exhumed bodies, and mutilated them. Due to the torture he endured, Safarov said he suffers from hearing loss in one ear, impaired vision, and missing teeth.

The trial in Baku concerns several Armenian nationals charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, the preparation and conduct of aggressive war, genocide, terrorism, financing of terrorism, and the violent seizure and retention of power.

By Aghakazim Guliyev