The Azerbaijani troops violated the rights of the residents of Tegh, a village in Armenia’s Syunik Province, as a result of their criminal actions on July 19, Armenia’s Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) Arman Tatoyan said in a statement.
In particular, on the basis of complaints and alarms, the fact-finding activities of the human rights defender revealed the following:
First, it turned out that on July 19, between 10am and 10:30am, one of the residents of Tegh village was harvesting grain with a combine on the land legally owned by him and his family.
The land plot of the villager is located in the immediate vicinity of the Azerbaijani positions. Nevertheless, the combine operator had to collect the wheat from the peripheral parts of the land as well to make the work complete.
When the combine operator completed the work in one of the peripheral sections, he was about 150 meters away from that place, deep in the territory of the Republic of Armenia and noticed that a group of Azerbaijani servicemen were approaching him. The Azeri soldiers threatened the villager with firearms, yelled and shoved him, trying to take him and the combine to their positions.
The results of the ombudsman’s fact-finding activities confirm that the Azerbaijani troops factually illegally deprived of liberty the farmer, a resident of a village in Syunik Province of Armenia, who had been harvesting grain on his own land, and obstructed the work for a long while.
The combine operator immediately contacted the head of the Tegh community. Subsequently, due to the efforts of the community leader, the Armenian armed forces and the command staff of the local Russian border troops, the combine and the combine operator were returned to the Armenian side at around 4:30pm.
The ombudsman will provide objective evidence of this incident...
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