Armenian mother Ani Avetisyan, who was shot by an Azerbaijani soldier while protecting her children inside her own home, underwent a third operation on November 6 to rebuild a crushed femur, reports Zartonk Media.
The Investigative Committee said on November 13 that it has completed its investigation into Azerbaijani serviceman Nasimi Musayev and sent the case and indictment to the supervising prosecutor. He was charged on October 2 with illegally crossing the border, smuggling military goods, illegal firearms trafficking, illegal entry into a residence and causing grievous bodily harm with a firearm, and remanded in custody for 2 months.
Avetisyan came home to Shaki, in Syunik Province, on October 1 to find Musayev pointing a rifle at her 2 children. He had held them for about 15 minutes. “For 15 minutes my children suffered in terror, they were hostages, I was not afraid, I went inside,” Avetisyan said.
She walked toward him. He fired and missed. When he aimed at her son, she grabbed the rifle with her hand, and that shot took the thumb from her left hand and seriously injured her other fingers.
“I went forward, I saw that he was aiming it at the child. I went forward, he saw me, aimed it at me, shot once, it didn’t hit,” she said. “He held it so that he could hit my son. I held it with my hand, I hurt my hand.”
He threw her onto a bed and beat her. She told her daughter to open the gate and tried to get her son out of the house, and he put the rifle against her chest, she forced it down as he fired, and the third shot hit her leg.
She fought him with a kitchen knife. He ran out of ammunition, tried to reload, weakened and fled, and was found at another address in Shaki and detained at 3:30 p.m. “If I had not made up my mind at that moment, neither I nor the child would be here now,” she said.
Avetisyan did not know the man was Azerbaijani. “He didn’t exchange a word at all, he was silently doing his job,” she said. Her 15 year old son fractured his right wrist in the struggle and her 12 year old daughter suffered a soft tissue contusion, and Avetisyan has been awarded a medal and a certificate of gratitude for what she did.
The November 6 operation was her third. Surgeons cut the upper part of her femur and moved it down so the bone can regrow and join the lower section, and her leg is now held together with metal from below the knee to the upper thigh. “They said that the bone was completely crushed, with a gap under the knee,” Avetisyan said. “They said that the new result will be visible in three to four months.”
A further operation will follow to lengthen the leg. “I’m in pain all day, I’m taking painkillers,” she said, and her treatment, medication and care are funded by the state. Her children are living with their grandmother in a village near Masis and attending school there, her son’s wrist has not healed, and her daughter has not recovered either. “There is no change in the girl’s psychological state,” Avetisyan said. “When she is left alone, she feels bad again.”
Armenia’s National Security Service said Azerbaijan notified it on September 29 that a serviceman had left his unit and might have crossed the border. Nobody warned the residents of Shaki. “If they had warned me, I wouldn’t have sent the children to school, we wouldn’t have stayed in Shaki,” Avetisyan said.
The police reached her house after she did, though the Sisian station is closer to Shaki than the hotel she drove from. “If they knew since the 29th of the month that an Azerbaijani had arrived, how could they not immediately run and come running with the alarm?” she said.
Speaking in the National Assembly in October, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the shooting an ordinary criminal incident and said the family should have waited for the police. “I understand that maternal instinct is strong, but when the police are called, we must wait for police action,” he said.
On November 3, Investigative Committee Chairman Artur Poghosyan told reporters at the National Assembly that Musayev had been questioned and that the facts established in the investigation indicated he had no intent to kill, and declined to disclose the content of that testimony, citing the confidentiality of the preliminary investigation. Poghosyan described the charges that day as grievous bodily harm, unlawful deprivation of liberty, violating the inviolability of a home, theft and illegally crossing the border. The charges in the final indictment have not been published.
