BAKU — Azerbaijan said Saturday it had
freed 10 Armenian soldiers captured last month during fighting between the
Caucasus arch foes.
After Russia-mediated talks,
"Azerbaijan handed over 10 Armenian soldiers to the Armenian side",
the Azeri security services said in a statement, without giving a date for
their release.
اضافة اعلان
Armenia in exchange passed on maps of mine
fields it had planted in territory that Azerbaijan seized from it last year in
the war for the Nagorno-Karabakh region, it said.
The swap comes after Azerbaijan's President
Ilham Aliev and Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pachinian agreed to ease
tensions last week at a rare meeting in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi.
It is the first concrete sign of a decrease
in tensions between both sides since last month's fighting, which killed 13
people.
Those were the worst clashes along the
shared border since a six-week war last year over Nagorno-Karabakh that claimed
more than 6,500 lives.
At the end of that war, Armenia was forced
to sign a humiliating Russian-brokered accord with Azerbaijan that saw it cede
three districts around Karabakh that it had captured in the 1990s.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in
Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991, and an ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.
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