By Ruzanna Stepanian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am) — The long list of accusations leveled by Azerbaijan against Armenian businessman and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan includes a plot to assassinate Azerbaijani diplomats serving abroad.
Azerbaijani government-controlled media outlets revealed the extraordinary charge in their coverage of February 13th’s court hearing in Vardanyan’s ongoing trial in Baku. They reported no evidence in support of it. They cited an Azerbaijani prosecutor as comparing the alleged plot to the assassinations by Armenian activists of masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
Mesrop Arakelyan, a leader of an Armenian opposition party linked to Vardanyan, said on Friday, February 14, that this accusation is just as “laughable” as the others.
“It is obvious that all of Azerbaijan’s accusations are from the genre of fantasy,” Arakelian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Vardanyan, who held the second-highest post in Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership from November 2022 to February 2023, was arrested at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor in September 2023 as he fled the region along with tens of thousands of its ordinary residents displaced by an Azerbaijani offensive. He was initially charged with “financing terrorism,” illegally entering Karabakh and supplying its armed forces with military equipment.
Vardanyan said last month he is now facing as many as 42 charges. In a statement circulated via his Yerevan-based family, he rejected them as politically motivated and accused Azerbaijani authorities of attributing false testimony to him.
