Azerbaijan will transfer Artur Badalyan to Armenia on Thursday at 14.00, Shain Sultanov, secretary of the Azerbaijani state commission for prisoners of war, hostages and missing citizens, said, RIA Novosti reports.
The transfer will be carried out in the Agdam District of Azerbaijan. Sultanov said that Armenia will exchange Sultanov for an Azerbaijani junior sergeant, Anar Gajiyev, who has been imprisoned in Armenia since May 10, 2009.
Ilakha Guseynova, press-secretary of the office of the International Red Cross Committee in Baku, told RIA Novosti on Wednesday that Armenia had informed the Red Cross about the exchange.
Azerbaijan transferred three Armenian prisoners of war to a third country at their own request.
Azerbaijan currently has three Armenian servicemen and five civilians – the family of a deserter from Armenia and three of his children.
The presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia - Serzh Sargsyan, Ilham Aliyev and Dmitry Medvedev - passed a joint declaration on a Nagorno-Karabakh settlement in Sochi on March 5. The document emphasizes devotion to peaceful means of settling the conflict and carrying out monitoring of incidents on the contact line, under the auspices of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group and the assistance of a special representative of the OSCE chairman.
The declaration says that the leaders looked at a practical realization of the trilateral agreement adopted during the previous meeting in Astrakhan on October 27, 2010. The presidents agreed to exchange prisoners of war in the shortest possible time scale.
