Robert Musayelyan’s family has not heard from him for more than a year. He is considered missing. The 83-year-old man is a resident of the village of Sznek in Artsakh. He left his residence on September 19, 2023, when the Azerbaijani army attacked the peaceful population of Artsakh. His son, Edward Musayelyan, who was the head of the village of Sznek, said in an interview with Forrights.am that he lost contact with his father during the evacuation.
“I was in the positions. Our village was on the front line. When the attack happened, the residents were evacuated to the neighboring village of Khachmach, and he disappeared from there. Events developed very quickly, the enemy entered Khachmach from our village,” said Edward Musayelyan.
According to the son, his father spent the night in one of the houses in Khachmach, together with five fellow villagers. The next day, when the residents of Sznek were forced to leave Khachmach, Robert Musayelyan went missing along with a fellow villager.
“There is one more person who is considered missing with him. My father is 83 years old. The other man that was with him, Shura Manasyan, is 86 years old. At first, there was an attack on our village; from there people were transferred, supposedly, to a safe place, Khachmach. But on the same day there was an attack on Khachmach. The residents were evacuated at night, but they stayed in the house of one of the residents of Khachmach. There were six of them, all of whom were residents of our village,” said Edward, noting that the fate of four of the six is still known.
“Two of the six, a woman named Nvard and and a man named Mavrik, are residents of our village. They were captured on the road from Khachmach to Karmir village. They kept them in Shushi for a week, then returned him to us. The third, Artyusha Mikayelyan, was given away dead. His body was found in the Khachmach area, in the forest, they told us his whereabouts later, our rescuers went and found it. They killed him. They also captured another person, now he is on trial in Baku, Melikset Pashayan. The other two are my father and that man from our village, about whom there is no information,” he said.
According to Edward Musayelyan, when these six people realized that there was no one in Khachmach anymore, decided to walk to Karmir Village on September 20. “They thought they would slowly advance towards Stepanakert. They got separated on the way, and the fates of these people turned out differently. In fact, Khachmach had been evacuated, and those six people remained there. We did not know that they had remained there. I last saw my father on the 19th of the month. When the fighting was already starting, we went to positions. I learned later that he disappeared halfway through. I was in positions until the ceasefire and there was no contact to know where he was. I knew that my residents had been evacuated to Khachmach, where it was a little safer,” said Edward Musayelyan, noting that he only learned that his father was missing after reaching Stepanakert.
Edward Musayelyan searched for his father among the wounded and victims, even providing a DNA sample for identification, but there were no results. He also met with Nvard and Mavrik, who were in captivity and returned, to find out any information about his father. “I met them in Yerevan. They said that they last saw my father on the road from Khachmach to Karmir village. They said that my father’s health did not allow him to walk a long distance, he sat down somewhere, said, ‘You move forward, I can’t come.’ No one knows what happened to him in those forests. He had a leg problem, he had heart surgery, he couldn’t move forward. I contacted the Red Cross many times, and then when the rescuers started checking the villages a few days later, they didn’t know that there were people in the forests too. They checked the house where they stayed one night; there was no one there. But there was no one checking the forests,” said Edward Musayelyan.
Narek Kirakosyan
