37 years have passed since the Sumgayit events, which were orchestrated by Armenian provocations.

 As reported by “EDnews,” these events, which occurred on February 28, 1988, were part of a series of provocations against Azerbaijan organized by the Soviet Union’s State Security Committee in collaboration with Armenian nationalists. The objective was, as always, to shape a false narrative in the international community and foster anti-Azerbaijani sentiment. All witness statements confirm that the organizer of the Sumgayit events was Eduard Grigoryan, an Armenian with two previous convictions. During the Sumgayit events, Grigoryan personally killed five Armenians. In summary, the ethnic unrest in Sumgayit was the culmination of deliberate provocations of this nature during that period.

In 1988, the population of Sumgayit city was 258,000, with approximately 18,000 of them being ethnic Armenians. Up until February 1988, there had been no ethnic confrontations in Sumgayit, and the city, like other Azerbaijani cities, maintained its multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character.

On February 26, 1988, Sumgayit’s central square was taken over by protesters in response to the murder of two young men by Armenians in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region. This protest was then incited into a riot by Armenian extremists and provocateurs. In order to investigate the unrest, the USSR Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a criminal case, assembling a special investigative-operational group led by investigator Vladimir Galkin, consisting of 231 investigators and an equal number of operatives from various regions of the country.

The investigation conducted by the USSR Prosecutor General’s Office concluded that, during the unrest, 6 Azerbaijanis were killed. The court sentenced 92 individuals to long-term imprisonment, and one person was sentenced to death. However, due to the pressures from the Soviet political leadership and the State Security Committee, the investigation was not concluded logically, and the organizers and masterminds behind the events were not identified.

To reveal the true nature of this crime and investigate the aspects that the USSR Prosecutor General’s Office passed over in silence, as a manifestation of Azerbaijan’s strong political will, and by the order of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, and the decision of the Prosecutor General, the investigation of five criminal cases previously conducted and later suspended by the former USSR Prosecutor General’s Office was resumed and consolidated into a unified case. The investigation was assigned to a special investigative-operational group consisting of investigators and operatives from the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the State Security Service, under the leadership of the First Deputy Prosecutor General.

As a result of necessary investigative-operational measures carried out by the investigation-operational group, the true nature of the events came to light. It was determined that the riots were organized by Armenian separatist forces, following a pre-prepared scenario under the instructions of pro-Armenian forces within the Soviet leadership. As proof of this, at a book presentation event titled “First Sources on the Sumgayit Events” held in Moscow on March 31, 2016, journalist Saadet Qadirova, along with former members of the initial investigative-operational group of the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, including Vladimir Kalinichenko, stated that the Sumgayit events were orchestrated by the USSR State Security Committee on the order of the Soviet leadership, which served the interests of the Armenian lobby. Consequently, no one was held accountable for organizing the riots.

The evaluation and analysis of the materials gathered by the current investigation group confirm that the riots in Sumgayit were a provocation organized by the special services of Armenia and the Soviet KGB against Azerbaijan. Armenian ideologists and individuals within the Soviet leadership who openly supported them, realizing the illegality of Nagorno-Karabakh’s separation from Azerbaijan according to the Soviet Constitution, resorted to this provocation to justify the impossibility of Armenians and Azerbaijanis living together, ensure the complete expulsion of Azerbaijanis from the territory of Armenia, and discredit Azerbaijan.

In January-February 1988, before the mass riots occurred in Sumgayit, 84 Armenian depositors withdrew a total of 143,064 rubles from 14 deposit offices operating in the city. During the investigation, it was also revealed that numerous phone calls were made to Armenia and money transfers were carried out through the post offices operating in the city during those months.

The investigation revealed that one of the active participants in the well-known events in Sumgayit, which took place between February 27-29, 1988, was Eduard Grigoryan. Grigoryan gathered a group of people around him, led them, and carried out attacks on the homes of Armenian citizens in the city based on a previously prepared list, with calls such as “Death to Armenians,” “Follow me,” and others. Armenian victims (Lyudmila and Karina Mejlumyan sisters, Manvel Petrosyan, and others), who were subjected to attacks, violence, and torture, testified that it was Eduard Grigoryan who led and gave instructions to those who attacked their homes, and the people there acted according to his instructions and orders. An interesting fact also emerged during the investigation.

It was found that Eduard Grigoryan, who was convicted for the murder of Armenian residents of Sumgayit, was transferred to the Yerevan City Investigation Detention Center of Armenia on August 26, 1991, after the verdict was read on December 22, 1989, during the existence of the USSR. This raises the question of what “services” Eduard Grigoryan provided to be handed over to Armenia. On February 9, 2015, a decision was made to involve Eduard Grigoryan as a person charged under the relevant articles of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan, effective until September 1, 2000, and an arrest warrant was issued by the court.

It has been determined that a large number of Armenians living in Sumqayit transferred financial funds to the “Krunk” society. The majority of the victims in Sumqayit were Armenians who refused to voluntarily transfer funds to the “Krunk” society, which operates in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region. Specifically, the criminal group entered a building, attacking the apartments of Armenians living on the upper floors, while avoiding those on the lower floors. It was later revealed that the owners of the homes that were not attacked had regularly transferred funds to the “Krunk” society. Testimonies from witnesses confirmed that the homes of those who transferred money to the “Krunk” society were not targeted. It was even determined that Armenian musicians, some of whom earned money from weddings and other events, also transferred some of their earnings to the “Krunk” society.

The materials of the criminal case further show that if it were not for the individual humanity and courage of the Azerbaijani residents of Sumqayit, the events would have escalated into a larger-scale provocation according to a planned scheme. As indicated by the testimonies of Armenian witnesses, during the events, they were sheltered by Azerbaijani families in their homes and were saved.

Despite the special control and censorship applied to photo and video shootings during the USSR period, the events were filmed using pre-arranged methods and were immediately removed from the territory of the USSR, spreading as part of an anti-Azerbaijani campaign through Armenian lobby organizations.

Although the Sumqayit events were deliberately used by Armenia and Armenian lobby circles for propaganda and disinformation purposes against Azerbaijan, the measures taken by the Azerbaijani state, along with the conducted objective and fact-based investigation materials, have proven with sufficient and irrefutable evidence that these disturbances were organized and committed by Armenian nationalists and their supporters to achieve their malicious goals.

Madina Mammadova//EDnews