cynical and false statements by Amazasp and his commissar Veluntz

that ”the city was burnt and massacre committed by Shiites and Sun-

nis in a blood feud.” His statement regarding “the punitive squad dis-

patched to Guba on Shaumyan’s will with selection of troops to be

made by war minister Korganov” was of a particular importance for

the investigation. Like the Guba residents, Ghelovani admitted there

was “not a single Russian in Amazasp’s squad manned exclusively by

Armenians, all of them Dashnaktsakan to the last person. Amazasp

himself was a zealous Dashnaktsakan”. Ghelovani noted specifical-

ly that “Davachi and Alpan villages located several miles away from

Guba were set ablaze by Amazasp’s squad just because of their Mus-

lim origin”. (175)

This way or another, either due to trustworthy nature of his

statements or lack of malice and personal hostility in his actions or

the overall summary of the case, David Chelovani was not indicted in

Guba’s devastation case.

A notable detail is that even after the downfall of the Bolshevik

regime, Ghelovani stayed in Baku employed by the Labor Inspection

under the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan. In late Octo-

ber 1919 he was assassinated near the Sabunchu Train Station by

two shots. The assassin, an ethnic Armenian named Sarkis Teruntz,

dropped the gun at the crime scene and tried to abscond, however

he was apprehended by an Azerbaijani soldier (askar) Aminov, who,

together with three other persons witnessed Teruntz while shooting

Ghelovani. S.Teruntz steadily refused his guilt claiming that “he did

not shoot, he just tried to run away once he heard the shots, and

that was the reason of being detained”. (176) He never admitted his

guilt in the course of further investigation, despite sufficient number

of witnesses including two policemen and two gendarmes and the

material evidence, “a Mauser smoking with gunpowder”, so the true

motif of the criminal offence was never established.

Meanwhile, with no credit to Teruntz’s testimonies, the investi-

gation was trying to find out Chelovani’s links with Dashnaktsutyun

party, and the case of Teruntz was passed over to the Military Pro-

secutor of the Azerbaijani Tribunal. This born in mind there are suffi-

cient grounds to believe that Ghelovani’s assassination had a political

motivation.

It should be also hereby noted that by late 1919, the investiga-

Events of 1918 in Guba in the Context of Plans for Mass Extermination

of Azerbaijan’s Muslim Population