The declared purpose of the unprecedented visit was to attend an international conference organized there by Azerbaijan’s State Security Service.
Simonian flew to Baku despite the Azerbaijani authorities’ continuing refusal to free at least 23 Armenian prisoners, including eight former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, held by them. He also heads an Armenian interagency commission on prisoners and missing persons.
Some relatives of the captives hoped that he will accelerate their release or at least collect more information about their health and prison conditions.
“We expected him to bring some news to us,” one of them told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We don't know anything about what they [the Armenian authorities] are doing,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “They come and go for themselves. They don’t keep people informed about what's going on.”
She said she and other relatives therefore want Simonian to meet them and answer their questions about his visit.
The NSS chief made no public statements on his return to Yerevan. It was therefore not clear whether he discussed the fate of the prisoners with Azerbaijani officials. Other details of his trip to Baku were also not known as of Monday evening.
Prospects for the release anytime soon of the captives remain uncertain even after the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington on August 8. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian at the White House commits Baku to freeing them.
This fact gave more ammunition to Pashinian’s domestic critics who accuse him of doing little to secure the prisoners’ release. Pashinian again denied that following the Washington talks.
The Azerbaijani authorities until recently allowed representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to periodically to visit the Armenian prisoners to inspect their detention conditions, inquire about their health and arrange phone calls between them and their families. They most recently did so in June.
The ICRC lost that exclusive access after being forced to end its mission in Azerbaijan on September 3. The captives’ families are now even more concerned about their treatment.