Details added (first version posted on 12:41)
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 24
By Samir Ali - Trend:
Armenia’s chauvinism policy poses a threat to regional development, Eldar Samadov, deputy head of the Working Group of Azerbaijan’s State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons, said April 24.
He was speaking at a conference titled “Armenia’s policy of aggression and state terrorism - main threat to regional development and cooperation” in Baku.
“Both in the beginning and the end of the 20th century, Armenian nationalists carried out a policy of ethnic cleansing against the Azerbaijani people, and as a result, 20 percent of Azerbaijani lands were occupied, and 3,875 Azerbaijani citizens went missing during the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” he said.
“The Azerbaijani Prosecutor General’s Office, the Military Prosecutor’s Office, Interior Ministry and the abolished Ministry of National Security initiated more than 600 criminal cases related to terrorist acts committed by Armenia against Azerbaijan, and investigative measures were carried out.”
Samadov noted that in connection with the clarification of the missing Azerbaijani citizens’ fate, close cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is being carried out.
The work continues on collecting DNA samples from close relatives of the missing persons in order to conduct further work on exhumation and identification, and these samples are kept in the hospital of the State Security Service, he said.
Adding that the Armenian terror in general is more than 100 years old, Samadov reminded about the killings of Turkish diplomats by Armenia’s ASALA terrorist group in various countries.
In turn, Gasim Hajiyev, an employee of the Institute of Caucasus Studies of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), said that the Armenian state never existed in the South Caucasus region.
“The Armenian state was created artificially, it is a nest of state terrorism,” he stressed.