Artsakh State Minister Gurgen Nersisyan reports that Azerbaijani troops today detained a 68-year-old Artsakh citizen who was being transferred to Armenia via the Lachin Corridor for medical treatment.

The detained was part of a larger group of individuals travelling to Armenia under the auspices of the International Red Cross (IRC).

Nersisyan writes an IRC official is with the detained individual and that negotiations are underway to have him released. The other patients have reached the Armenian town of Goris.

Update: The Azerbaijani Press Agency (APA), citing Azerbaijan’s General Prosecutor’s Office, writes the Artsakh citizen detained today while travelling to Armenia for medical treatment under the auspices of the Red Cross was a member of an illegal armed group that committed ethnic cleansing in Karabakh’s Khojaly region in December 1991.

The APA writes that in 2013 Baku issued an arrest warrant for the man, identified as 68-year-old Vagif Khachaturyan, but that his whereabouts remained unknown until today.

“As a result of the search activities carried out, on July 29, 2023, Vagif Khachaturyan was detained by the servicemen of the State Border Service at the Lachin border checkpoint of the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border while trying to leave for the Republic of Armenia for treatment through the International Committee of the Red Cross,” the APA reports, adding that Khachaturyan will be transferred to a hospital in Baku.

Artsakh State Minister Adviser Artak Beglaryan has refuted the above allegation made by Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office.

"Vagif Khachatryan was born in 1955 in Artsakh and lives in Patara village. Like all men, he also defended his homeland in the war of 1991-1994. However, Azerbaijan's accusations are false, because such a crime did not take place in the village of Meshali. Today he was kidnapped in the presence of his daughter and ICRC representatives," Beglaryan wrote on his Twitter page.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry has described the incident as an “abduction and a gross violation of international humanitarian law”.

On July 30, Artsakh State Minister Gurgen Nesisyan told Hetq that the International Red Cross (IRC) informed him that Vagif Khachatryan had been transported to a Baku hospital and that IRC officials had visited him there.