‘The pregnant woman and her sister died embracing the child’: The rescue team commander shares details

Over a week has passed since the tragic explosion at the ‘Surmalu’ shopping center, yet one person is still considered missing. The Ministry of Emergency Situations of Armenia continues not only search and rescue operations but also cleanup efforts in the area, occasionally conducting necessary demolitions to ensure the safety of subsequent works.

In an interview with ‘Armtimes,’ the commander of the 18th rescue squad from the Specialized Rescue Work Center, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Avetisyan, shared his insights. Avetisyan has been working with the rescue team for over ten years, yet he noted that he had never seen such a large-scale incident as ‘Surmalu’ during his service. The most challenging aspect was the high number of casualties. ‘In the first few hours, we did not have clear information about how many people were trapped under the rubble,’ he explains.

Reflecting on the events after his shift, he recounts that four bodies were recovered from five adjacent stalls in the northern part of ‘Surmalu.’ The psychological burden was heaviest while retrieving the pregnant woman and her child. ‘There was a basement area in front of the four stalls, and four people—a pregnant woman, her 5-year-old child, her sister, and a shop employee—were brought out from the basement stairs: three steps up, they were found embracing each other. It is presumed they tried to escape, but the collapse occurred. They did not suffer from any fire, only injuries from the rubble. The pregnant woman sustained severe injuries to her head, while the shop employee was also wounded from the collapse. The sister of the pregnant woman was unharmed. The child’s clothes were completely clean, not even dusty; they died embracing him. Initially, when we brought the small child out, seeing her long, curly hair, we thought it was a girl. The hardest part was retrieving that child; she was the age of my daughter. I’ve been in service since 2011, and I’ve often dealt with the bodies of burn victims and other tragic accidents, but I was not psychologically prepared for the sight of a pregnant woman and child,’ he recounted.