Armed Azerbaijanis captured Lernik Aghajanyan from Artsakh and severely beat him. Lernik is 43 years old man, from Kichan village, Martakert region of NK. He was working as a caretaker at a livestock farm located a few kilometers away from Kichan. He came home during the shootings on September 19, returned to the livestock farm the next day, on September 20th, to do his work, and was captured.
“When I tried to get the cattle down, they caught them three meters away from the farm. There is a road and there are forests on both sides of the road. There were many of them, several hundred people: the whole forest was full of them,” Lernik tells Forrights.am.
After being captured, he was beaten and received blows on almost all parts of his body. “They beat me and took me to Aghdam. Before I was taken to Aghdam, they beat me, they beat me a lot. I was wearing a military uniform, that’s why they beat him,” says Lernik, noting that they thought he was a soldier.
“They were hitting and asking me the locations of your generals, soldiers, weapons, and tanks. There was an officer, who spoke Armenian: he asked the questions. I was telling them that I didn’t know, but they were hitting me. They threw me on the ground beat me with hands, machine guns, feet: several people beat me,” Lernik suffered a number of physical injuries on his head and other parts of his body as a result of the beating. “They hit me on the head with a machine gun and said, ‘You did it, we are doing it too.'” During my captivity, I was not given any medical care.
Lernik stayed in Aghdam for eight days. During the captivity, he was afraid that he would be transferred to Baku and tried like other captives. “I was thinking that they will take me to Baku and torture me to death. When I was being transferred, I was afraid that they were taking me to Baku, but then I saw that they were taking me to Shushi.”
Lernik says that they gave him food and water in captivity. He refused to eat, thinking that he would be poisoned; he only drank water. “I didn’t eat the meals they brought, because I knew what was in them.”
The Azerbaijanis caused not only physical but also psychological pain to the captive Artsakh citizens. “They forced me to call Stepanakert Khankendi, I didn’t say it, I said Stepanakert.”
Lernik’s relatives thought that he was killed by the Azerbaijanis, because they had no information about him for days. Lernik was also robbed while in captivity, he says that at that moment he had about six hundred thousand drams [about $1,500] on him, which they took from his hands in Aghdam. “There was also 80 thousand dollars in the house. I kept cattle, I got a salary. I had my cattle, I sold them, I collected the money: there was no place to spend it.”
Narek Kirakosyan