Azeri soldiers were executed by Armenian separatists during the first Nagorno-Karabakh enclave war in the early 1990s.
Azerbaijan said today it has discovered a mass grave of Azeri soldiers who Baku says were executed by Armenian separatists during the first war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the early 1990s, in which 3,000 people died.
“A mass grave of Azeri soldiers tortured and executed during the first Karabakh war was discovered in the village of Edili,” Hikmet Khajiev, diplomatic adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, said on Twitter today.
He said 4,000 Azeri were still missing from that first war and accused Armenia of refusing to announce the site of mass burials of Azeri soldiers.
An official of the Azerbaijan Prisoners of War Committee, Namig Efendiyev, told AFP that 25 bodies had been discovered since February in the mass grave in Edili.
Nagorno-Karabakh: A war that never ended
The announcement comes as fighting on Armenia’s official border with Azerbaijan has killed at least 280 people in September, sparking fears of another full-scale war between the two countries.
On Sunday, Yerevan accused Baku of committing “war crimes” in the recent hostilities, notably executing and torturing Armenian soldiers it had captured.
In response, Baku announced the launch of an investigation by its military prosecutor’s office into possible extortion.
The two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus fought a first war over control of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s that left 30,000 people dead and was never really settled.
In the fall of 2020, they clashed again on a large scale over this mountainous region, which officially belongs to Azerbaijan but is inhabited mainly by Armenians.
This latest war claimed the lives of 6,500 people and ended in defeat for Yerevan, which lost territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, where 2,000 Russian troops were deployed following a Moscow-sponsored ceasefire.
But with Russia increasingly isolated on the international stage after invading Ukraine in late February, the United States and the European Union have made the first move in the normalization process without succeeding in preventing further episodes or, for now at least, in ending in a peace treaty.
Yesterday, Tuesday, Azerbaijan however released 17 Armenian prisoners of war after mediation by Washington.
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