3 July 2024
An Armenian contract soldier has been arrested for allegedly handing over state and military secrets to Azerbaijan in exchange for sexual favours.
Armenia’s Investigative Committee announced the charges pressed against the 43-year-old contract soldier on Wednesday.
The soldier is accused of communicating with an undercover Azerbaijani agent, who allegedly lured him into having ‘romantic conversations’ with them.
The Investigative Committee said the soldier had ‘collected and handed over state service secrets, as well as military information regarding the weapons of the combat position under the protection of their unit’ between January 2023 and February 2024.
‘Those actions caused damage to the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and external security of the Republic of Armenia’, read the statement.
If found guilty, the soldier could face up to twenty years or life imprisonment.
The unnamed soldier was the latest among dozens to be charged with espionage in the years following the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020.
In September 2022, then Prosecutor General Arthur Davtyan proposed constitutional and legal changes that would prescribe the death penalty for treason.
He suggested that after examining several treason prosecutions during and after the 2020 war made ‘the question of strengthening the criminal and legal fight against this type of crime, and tightening the punitive policy, a priority’.
As of May, CivilNet reported that more than 30 criminal cases were launched against people accused of treason. Seventeen of those resulted in indictments with more than 25 people being tried in court, of which three people have so far been found guilty.
