Oct. 3 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has accused Azerbaijan of reneging on its promise to release 17 Armenian prisoners of war captured during the latest conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
“This is already the second time that Azerbaijan has refused to fulfill its promise to release Armenian prisoners of war. The first case was in May, when a promise was made in Brussels, and the second time is now, when Washington committed to freeing 17 Armenian prisoners of war,” he said on his official Twitter profile.
The deputy head of the Office of the Representative for International Legal Affairs, Diana Karazian, has reported that Baku has these 17 prisoners of war held in the country and that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has requested information about their status as prisoners. health, according to what Armenpress has collected.
As detailed by Karazian, at this time, as a result of the latest clashes that left more than 200 dead in what was the most serious fighting since 2020, around 30 prisoners, including civilians, are detained in Azerbaijan.
For his part, the secretary of the Security Council of Armenia, Armen Grigorian, recalled that on September 27, at the initiative of the US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, he agreed with the assistant to the president of Azerbaijan, Hikmet Hajiyev, to release to those captured in Nagorno-Karabakh before the end of September.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a territory physically located within Azerbaijan but it has a majority Armenian population, and has been a focus of conflict since it decided to separate in 1988 from the Azerbaijan region integrated into the Soviet Union.
The last hostilities between the two countries in 2020 lasted for six weeks and left thousands dead. They finally ceased when the two countries reached a Kremlin-brokered ceasefire agreement, allowing Russian peacekeepers to settle in Nagorno-Karabakh for a period of five years.
