Captives’ Relatives Seek Meeting With Armenian Official After His Trip To Baku

“We don’t know anything about what they [the Armenian authorities] are doing,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “They come and go for themselves. They don’t keep people informed about what’s going on.”

She said she and other relatives therefore want Simonyan to meet them and answer their questions about his visit.

The NSS chief made no public statements on his return to Yerevan. It was therefore not clear whether he discussed the fate of the prisoners with Azerbaijani officials. Other details of his trip to Baku were also not known as of Monday evening.

Prospects for the release anytime soon of the captives remain uncertain even after the initialization of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington on August 8. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House commits Baku to freeing them.

This fact gave more ammunition to Pashinyan’s domestic critics who accused him of doing little to secure the prisoners’ release. Pashinyan again denied that following the Washington talks.

The Azerbaijani authorities until recently allowed representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to periodically visit the Armenian prisoners to inspect their detention conditions, inquire about their health and arrange phone calls between them and their families. They most recently did so in June.