By Armen Dulian
The Azerbaijani military reported on Wednesday that two of its soldiers have been killed in skirmishes with Armenian forces east of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani media cited the Defense Ministry in Baku as saying that the two incidents occurred in Azerbaijan’s Aghdam and Fizuli districts mostly controlled by the Karabakh Armenian army. One of the victims, aged 19, was reported to have died in hospital on Tuesday night.
The ministry claimed that the fighting was the result of an Armenian ceasefire violation. It said Azerbaijani troops returned fire and killed three Armenian soldiers.
A Karabakh military spokesman, Senor Hasratian, denied this, saying that the Armenian side has registered no ceasefire violations and suffered no casualties on the main Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact in recent days.
Deadly skirmishes along the Karabakh frontline and the heavily militarized Armenian-Azerbaijani border remain a regular occurrence, with each party accusing the other of breaching a 1994 truce that stopped their bitter war for the Armenian-populated disputed territory. The defense ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia held a rare meeting last year in a bid to minimize such incidents.
(Photolur photo)