EDILLI, Azerbaijan —
Azerbaijan said
Wednesday it has discovered what it claims is a mass grave of its soldiers
allegedly executed by Armenian separatist forces during the 1990s war over the
disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
اضافة اعلان
Baku and Yerevan fought two wars — in 2020 and in
the 1990s — over the contested mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an
Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan.
“A mass grave of Azerbaijani servicemen tortured and
executed during the first Karabakh war was discovered in the village of
Edilli,” Hikmet Hajiyev, the foreign policy adviser to President Ilham Aliyev,
said Wednesday on Twitter.
He said “4,000 Azerbaijani troops and civilians
remain missing since the (1990s) war and Armenia refuses to disclose the
locations of mass graves.”
Namig Efendiyev of the state commission for
prisoners of war told AFP that “25 human remains were discovered since February
at the mass grave”.
Baku’s announcement came days after
Armenia accused
Azerbaijani troops of war crimes committed during deadly border clashes last
month.
In September, at least 286 people were killed on
both sides before a US-brokered truce ended the worst clashes since the
neighbors’ 2020 war.
On Sunday,
Armenia’s foreign ministry said “numerous videos regularly (published) by
Azerbaijani users on social media demonstrate the war crimes”, including
extrajudicial killings and torture of Armenian POWs and desecration of corpses.
Azerbaijan said on the same day that its military
prosecutor’s office had launched a probe into alleged war crimes committed by
Baku forces.
The six-week war in 2020 claimed the lives of more
than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory
it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian
peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
On Sunday, the foreign ministers of Armenia and
Azerbaijan met in Geneva where they began drafting the text of a future peace
treaty.
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