Baku’s Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to sentence Vagif Khachatryan to fifteen years after finding the sixty-eight-year-old former Artsakh resident of being a member of an illegal armed group that committed ethnic cleansing in Karabakh’s Khojaly region in December 1991.

Azerbaijani customs officials detained Khachatryan on July 29 as he was travelling to Armenian from Artsakh along the Lachin Corridor.

Khachatryan was part of a larger group of individuals travelling to Armenia for medical treatment under the auspices of the International Red Cross (IRC).

Former Artsakh State Minister Artak Beglaryan denied the accusations against Khachatryan.

"Azerbaijan's accusations are false, because such a crime did not happen in the village of Meshali," Beglaryan wrote in his X microblog, adding that like all men, he also defended his homeland in the 1991-1994 war.

On November 27, 2023, Baku’s military court sentenced Khachatryan to fifteen years in prison. Khachatryan will spend five years of his sentence in prison, and the remainder in a correctional facility.