YEREVAN. – A group of relatives of the Shirak Province captives in Azerbaijan are holding a protest in front of the main building of the Armenian government.

They demand from the government to have all their sons returned from captivity.

Over the course of the past one year, only 29 of these 62 Shirak-resident captives have been returned to Armenia.

After the 44-day Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war in the fall of 2020, the village of Khtsaberd in the Hadrut region of Artsakh was under Armenian control. But on December 12 of the same year, Azerbaijan had attacked Hin Taghlar and Khtsaberd villages and captured 62 Armenian servicemen from Shirak Province of Armenia.

Along the lines of the respective the criminal case, Lieutenant Colonel Arsen Ghazaryan has been charged under the Criminal Code article on abandoning the place of service voluntarily during martial law, not carrying out the order during martial law, showing negligence towards military service during martial law, and voluntarily abandoning the battlefield or refusing to use weapons during battle.