They were forced to conduct an exhumation at Yerablur several days ago. Instead of burying Colonel of the Artsakh Defense Army, Hero of Artsakh Sergey Shakaryan (pictured), they had mistakenly buried Major Harutyun Nalbandyan from Vanadzor.
Similar mistakes take place during war, of course, but this incident caused a lot of questions to rise. Harutyun Nalbandyan’s family members knew about it beforehand and they said that the body belonged to their Harut. The response from law enforcement is shocking.
Aravot Daily spoke to the relatives of Harutyun Nalbandyan. His brother, Hovhannes Nalbandyan, said, “He lost connection on October 25th and we no longer had any information about my brother. We began to ask around, and we even looked for him in the worst place- the morgue. We were looking at the pictures one by one at the Heratsi morgue. I found a picture that looked like my brother. I asked the employees who that person was, and they said that they identified him as Colonel Shakaryan and sent his body for burial. I asked them how that could be Shakaryan if that’s my brother. They said no, they presented his body to us as Shakaryan’s. They brought the body to his family in a closed casket and buried him at Yerablur. After seeing that picture, I began to wonder if there was some confusion, so I appealed to the Human Rights Defender. The case was opened, but it wasn’t easy. After four months, around 15 days ago, they exhumed his body and realized that his DNA matched ours; it was our relative’s body. Until that point, they were giving us rude answers that they couldn’t give us anything. They kept lying and sending us to Artsakh one day, Goris the next, or wherever they could to get us off their backs. After going everywhere, we understood that there are no answers, they can’t make this heaviness go away, and we came to find the answer.”
When asked if his brother looks so similar to Sergey Shakaryan that such a mistake was possible, he said, “They have similar features, but there is a big age difference. My brother was 29, and Shakaryan was near 50. Besides that, Shakaryan was around 150 kg, but my brother was 90, so they should have noticed that difference. They made a huge mistake.”
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Harutyun Nalbandyan’s father, Gevorg Nalbandyan, is insulted. A special committee of the Ministry of Defense was established at Uletsi 56/5 to handle the appeals made by the relatives of soldiers missing in action and prisoners of war. Harutyun Nalbandyan’s father went there to gather information about his son. According to him, “When we went there the second time, they said, ‘You’re driving us crazy, neither you nor your soldier matter to us.’ I wrote a letter to the minister, but I didn’t receive a response or any information. If we didn’t exhume the grave, my child would have been lost. He has two young children, but no one called us to ask if we found our soldier and our major. He wasn’t a private soldier; he was a major in Artsakh. He worked with Shakaryan.”
Harutyun Nalbandyan’s family members will do everything to make sure that those responsible for this will be punished. “People like that must be punished, including the investigator and those who mistakenly identified the body as Shakaryan’s. People working in places like that who are stuffing themselves need to go sit somewhere else. There is still a lot we need to find out, and many issues need to be discussed. This case needs to continue,” Hovhannes Nalbandyan said.
Hripsime Jebejyan
