A petition has been launched urging the International Red Cross to exert pressure on Azerbaijan to allow for a meeting between the ICRC Baku office and Hakob Indjigulyan, the Armenian soldier who inadvertently strayed in Azerbaijani territory from Artsakh.

Mikayel Ghazarian, a Yerevan resident who launched the petition, prefaces it by writing: “We are shocked that the representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have yet not been able to meet the Armenian serviceman within a week of his the Azerbaijani captivity. The employees of the ICRC Baku Office requested the Azerbaijani government for a meeting with the captive POW but were rejected because of religious holidays.”

The petition states that Hakob Indjigulyan’s relatives, the Armenian government, and the International Red Cross in Baku and Yerevan, thus are not aware of the soldier’s true condition, which is an outright violation of the Third Geneva Convention (1949).

The petition also condemns the Baku authorities for a video interview of the soldier that appeared on several Azerbaijani news websites, accusing it of distorting the facts of the case.

The accusation is that Indjigulyan’s statement, made in Armenian, was translated in such a way as to give the impression that the Armenian soldier consciously crossed the border.