BAKU (RFE/RL)—Ramil Safarov, the Azerbaijani army officer who had hacked to death an Armenian colleague in Hungary, will return to active duty military service soon, a senior Azerbaijani military official said over the weekend.
“Right now Ramil Safarov is on vacation and having a rest. He will return to service after the vacation,” Major-General Ramiz Najafov, head of the external relations department at the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense, told the SalamNews agency. Najafov did not specify whether Safarov will serve and in what capacity.
Citing “threats” from Armenia, the general also said that Azerbaijani authorities are taking “necessary measures” to protect him against possible assassination attempts. “Relevant structures are taking security measures with regard to Safarov,” he said.
Safarov received a hero’s welcome in Baku on August 31 following his extradition from Hungary and immediate pardoning by President Ilham Aliyev more than eight years after he axe-murdered Armenian Lieutenant Gurgen Markarian during a NATO training course in Budapest. He was promoted from the rank of lieutenant to major, granted a free apartment and paid eight years’ worth of back pay the following day.
Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev personally met with the 35-year-old and wished him future success in his military career. Safarov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Hungarian court in 2006, has not been seen in public since then.
The release of the convicted axe-killer has provoked a furious reaction from Armenia and strong international criticism. The United States, the European Union and Russia consider it a serious blow to their long-running efforts to broker a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
“We continue to express our dismay and disappointment,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon told RFE/RL in Washington on Thursday.
“In our view, this is someone who should have continued to serve out his sentence, and certainly we were appalled by the glorification that we heard in some quarters of somebody who was convicted of murder,” Gordon said.
Najafov insisted, however, that Aliyev’s decision to pardon Safarov was an “exceptionally humane step.”
I am sick of seeing this hybrid cockroach-rat face!
I bet they will kill him too, so he becomes a “martyr”. Good riddance anyway.
Very ugly looking–including the inside.
He’ll kill again. This time it will be a fellow Azeri.
What a horrendously sick and depraved society Azerbaijan is. One can only hope that the addition of another psychopath to their officer ranks will continue the general rot from within, thus weakening this waste of a state even further. What animals.
scum bag
Armenians should learn from Israel.
This monkey should not be allowed to go free. Those who live by the axe shall die by the axe. He MUST be given a taste of his own medicine. Those who collaborated in freeing this murderer are accomplices in murder and must be treated accordingly. LET’S GET THIS MONKEY!
Armenian newspapers do not have to promote the popularization of killer
this is what the turks will do to us all if we open our borders
we should track down this turkish cockroach and liquidate it.
azeri/turkish version of David of Sasoun!
I give you ten to five,that the ugly turk wont be alive by 10/04/12