Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s office gave no reason for his decision to fire NSS Major-General Davit Sanamian. The latter’s primary area of responsibility was the coordination and oversight of the country’s border guard troops subordinate to the NSS.
The border guards are deployed along some sections of Armenia’s long border with Azerbaijan. One of those sections is not far from Shaki, a village in the southeastern Syunik province where the Azerbaijani serviceman, Nasimi Musayev, was captured on Thursday after seriously wounding a local resident, Ani Avetisian, inside her house.
According to Avetisian’s sister Arpi, she was shot in the foot and the hand while attempting to pull Musayev’s assault rifle away from her two children held at the gunpoint. The 39-year-old woman remained in a hospital in Yerevan on Sunday after undergoing surgery there. Her thighbone was shattered by gunfire, and doctors are now fighting to save her leg, Arpi Avetisian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
According to Azerbaijani authorities, Musayev deserted his military unit deployed on the Armenian border on September 26. The NSS claimed to have been notified by them about his disappearance on September 29.
Armenian opposition leaders have decried the NSS’s and other security agencies’ failure to issue security alerts to residents of local Armenian communities. They have portrayed the incident as a serious security breach highlighting what they call Pashinian’s continuing failure to secure the border with Azerbaijan.
Andranik Kocharian, a senior lawmaker representing the ruling Civil Contract party, on Monday also expressed concern at the incident while avoiding far-reaching conclusions.
“We have encountered a situation that must be prevented in the future,” he told journalists. “For two days, [the Azerbaijani soldier] was not merely within our territory but inside the home of one of our citizens.”
