Today is 22nd anniversary of Guren Margaryan`s murder

ArmInfo. Twenty-two years have passed since the brutal murder of Armenian army officer Gurgen Margaryan at a NATO training camp in Budapest by Azerbaijani Ramil  Safarov. The Azerbaijani soldier hacked the sleeping Armenian officer to death with an axe.

The perpetrator never received a fitting punishment for his brutal  act. Moreover, he was proclaimed a national hero of Azerbaijan for  the murder of an Armenian.

As a reminder, on February 19, 2004, Armenian army lieutenant Gurgen  Margaryan, who had been sent to Budapest for English language courses  as part of the NATO Partnership for Peace program, was brutally  hacked to death with an axe by Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov, a  participant in the same course. The Azerbaijani broke into  Margaryan's room while he was sleeping and hacked him to death. On  April 13, 2006, the Budapest Court of First Instance sentenced  Safarov to life imprisonment without parole for 30 years.

On August 31, 2012, Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov, who had been  sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary, was extradited to his  homeland. That same day, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a  decree pardoning him. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense paid the  killer's salary accumulated during his imprisonment (more than eight  years), provided him with an apartment, and promoted him to the rank  of major. Following Safarov's extradition, Armenia suspended  diplomatic relations and all official ties with Hungary that same  day.

However, in 2022, the Armenian side proposed to Hungary to turn the  page in bilateral relations and resume diplomatic contacts.