The issue regarding Karen Ghazaryan, who is in captivity in Azerbaijan, is not a simple issue.

Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who heads the electoral list of My Step alliance, on Wednesday stated the abovementioned at their meeting with voters in Noyemberyan town, and within the framework of their campaign rallies for the upcoming snap parliamentary election in Armenia.

He noted that Azerbaijan had made a semi-formal proposal to exchange the three Azerbaijanis in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) with the three Armenians in Azerbaijan.

“Azerbaijan has proposed to exchange everyone with everyone,” Pashinyan said. “[But] in reality, everything is not so simple because two Azerbaijani citizens are convicted in the Republic of Artsakh (…) because they have killed two citizens of Artsakh.”

He recalled that a few weeks ago, a 15-year-old boy from Turkey had crossed the border by mistake, but Armenia returned him without preconditions.

“We [Armenia] are not like Azerbaijan, which now attempts to portray Karen as a saboteur,” Pashinyan added. “It would be logical that they [Azerbaijan] would just return Karen [to Armenia].”

The acting PM noted that, according to the arrangement he had made recently with the Azerbaijani president—in Tajikistan’s capital city of Dushanbe, they now have a direct communication link, and they are dealing with the matter regarding Karen Ghazaryan through this link too.

“We [Armenia] will raise this matter at all international platforms,” Nikol Pashinyan stressed, “also in bilateral contacts.”

Karen Ghazaryan (born in 1984), a resident of Berdavan border village in Armenia’s Tavush Province, had ended up in Azerbaijan for unknown reasons, and was captured on July 15.

Azerbaijan attempted to present this incident as “the prevention of a reconnaissance group of the Armenian Armed Forces on the border.” The incident allegedly had occurred in the direction of Azerbaijan’s Gazakh Region. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry had said an Armenian serviceman was taken captive.

The Armenian Defense Ministry, however, formally declared that Ghazaryan had never served in the Armed Forces of Armenia.

As reported earlier, the residents of Berdavan village had recently blocked the road leading to Bagratashen checkpoint at the border with Georgia, and demanded that Karen Ghazaryan be returned from captivity in Azerbaijan.