Fuad Agayev , a prominent Azeri lawyer , said that Azeris " ... have to urgently stop this current campaign to raise Safarov to the rank of national hero . He is no hero . ” The United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs condemned Azerbaijan 's reaction to the brutal murder of the Armenian officer in a hearing . A report which was published by the Committee on Foreign Affairs contained a statement by Bryan Ardouny , Executive Director of the Armenian Assembly of America , who stated that " The Azerbaijani government has also consistently failed to condemn Safarov , an Azeri military officer who in 2003 sic brutally murdered an Armenian participant at a NATO Partnership for Peace military training exercise in Budapest , Hungary . Instead , it has encouraged domestic media and various organizations to treat the murderer as a celebrity . That individual has since been awarded the title of ' Man of the Year ' by Azerbaijan ’s National-Democratic Party . " After serving eight years of the life sentence , Safarov was extradited under the framework guidelines of the 1983 Strasbourg Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons and transferred to Azerbaijan on August 31 , 2012 . Although the Hungarian government stated that it had received assurances from the Azerbaijan government that the remainder of the sentence would be enforced , President Ilham Aliyev issued a pardon immediately upon Safarov 's arrival in Baku and ordered that he be " freed from the term of his punishment . " Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev promoted Safarov to the rank of major and the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan provided him with an apartment and over eight years of back pay . On September 1 , Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Elman Abdullayev said that the return of Safarov to Azerbaijan is a matter of relations between Azerbaijan and Hungary , which was resolved in the " framework of the law and is not contrary to norms and principles of the international law . " He described Sargsyan 's statements as " hysterical " and accused him of being one of the leaders of the group that committed the Khojaly Massacre
Khojaly Massacre
Khojaly Massacre
Ramil Safarov