RA Prosecutor’s Office

The Prosecutor General's Office of the Republic of Armenia publishes the materials of the examined criminal cases preserved in the archive of the Prosecutor's Office of Armenia regarding the facts of barbarism and mass violence against the Armenians living in Soviet Azerbaijan in the late 1980s. In cooperation with the non-governmental organization "Initiative for the Prevention of Xenophobia", an electronic archive was created based on the files of criminal cases, which contains tens of thousands of materials: testimonies of witnesses, victims, their relatives and successors, photographs, recognized material evidence and other documents.

The evidence refers especially to the barbaric actions (murders, rapes, violence, arson, robberies and thefts) that were also committed with the participation of the special services of Azerbaijan in Sumgait, Getashen and other regions of Nagorno-Karabakh. You can see the above-mentioned archival documents on the RA Prosecutor's Office website. In the first stage of the work, documents related to the Sumgait massacres were published on the site. In the future, the website will be supplemented with materials testifying to mass violence against Armenians in Getashen and the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. It should be noted that the evidence and testimonies published on the website are partially reduced.

The reason was that, according to the materials of the criminal cases, the massacres against the Armenians were organized and carried out by the Soviet Azerbaijan political leadership, and in some parts - by the law enforcement officers, who warned the population not to hide their Armenian neighbors, threatening that otherwise they would take revenge on them. Considering the fact that, according to the witnesses, in some cases the Armenians managed to escape with the help of their Azerbaijani or Russian neighbors, the addresses of the Armenian witnesses living in Sumgait, as well as the names of the Azerbaijanis who helped Armenians, are not published due to their safety. We believe that the materials of criminal cases will be useful both to historians, politicians, and to the whole society, as well as will contribute to the proper understanding and evaluation of these pages of history. The publication of these materials will not allow distorting the historical facts related to these events.