On February 19, 2004, in Budapest, the Azeri officer Ramil Safarov murdered the Armenian Army officer Gourken Markarian, hitting him 16 times with an axe while the latter was asleep. The murderer and his victim were attending lessons of English language at the Hungarian capital in the frame of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. The Hungarian court punished Safarov for this motivated by racism crime with life imprisonment with no right for pardon for the first 30 years of his imprisonment. On August 31, 2012, under suspicious conditions and although through all the period that lapsed since his conviction the criminal in question was honored in Azerbaijan as a national hero, the Hungarian authorities, violating the European and International Law, extradited Ramil Safarov to the Azerbaijani authorities. According to the official Azerbaijani news agency, the hereditary and life-long president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev, pardoned Safarov on the very day of his arrival in Azerbaijan and granted him the rank of major of the Azerbaijani army as a reward for his crime. The Assembly of the Armenians of Europe (AAE) does not wish to comment on the event, since the act of the Hungarian authorities is a self-evident adventurous step, the immorality of which is impossible to justify with any explanations. The Hungarian authorities were bribed and they violated the honor and prestige of their own country. Although the Armenian people, and specially the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh , had no expectations from the part of the Baku authorities, which constitute a real symbol of apartheid, their recent act is enough to convince the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmen that the murder of Armenians inside or outside Azerbaijan is considered by the latter’s government not as a crime but as an act of honor. On the basis of all the above facts and following the pogroms in Sumgait and Baku, the authorities of Nagorno Karabagh, which are taking bold democratic steps for the strengthening of the foundations of their governmental structures, have every right to ask the international community to stop defending the artificial frontiers of Azerbaijan and it’s supposed territorial integrity, endangering in this way the lives of the people of Karabagh just because they are Armenians. We ask all the international organizations and institutions to denounce in the proper way the immoral act of the Hungarian authorities so as to put an end to the adventurism, the bribery and the violation of the international laws for the sake of state interests. Assembly of the Armenians of Europe President, Garo Hakopian September 5, 2012 Uppsala, Sweden garo.hakopian@comhem.se

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