Armenian serviceman killed in ceasefire violation
On March 10, at 6:20 p.m., NKR Defense Army serviceman Arthur Aghababyan (born in 1992) was killed in a ceasefire violation by the Azerbaijani side along the Line of Contact between Karabakh and Azerbaijani armed forces, near the village of Kuropatkino.
"The unprecedented increase of ceasefire violations show that Azerbaijan is not committed to the Sochi agreement reached during the trilateral meeting of Armenian, Russian and Azerbaijani Presidents and continues escalating tension along the Line of Contact," NKR Defense Army said in a statement.
"Being the main initiator of ceasefire violations official Baku is impertinently attempting to distract the world community's attention from the situation in which Azerbaijan occurred by firing the Armenian positions several hours prior to the presidential meeting in Sochi and killing serviceman Grigor Shakhkyan (born in 1991) on the frontline. It is evident that Baku is trying to lay the blame of armistice violations on Armenia and is sparing no effort to render Armenia an aggressor in the eyes of the international community. Azeri reports that the Armenian side allegedly violated the ceasefire on March 8 killing an Azerbaijani child near the village of Orta Garvand are another evidence of it.
Concerned by the reports of ceasefire violations, on March 10 the OSCE Mission conducted monitoring along the Line of Contact in accordance with an earlier agreement reached with NKR authorities. However, the Azerbaijan party, unlike the Karabakh one, didn't lead the OSCE Mission to the earlier agreed site on its front-lines, as a result of which the monitoring groups had to conduct the monitoring from a more distanced site.
This comes to prove that Azerbaijani did its utmost to conceal the details of the incident. Furthermore, on the day of monitoring, Azerbaijan violated ceasefire in several sections of the Line of Contact. As a result, NKR Defense Army serviceman Arthur Aghababyan (born in 1992) was killed by Azerbaijani firing near Kuropatkino village at 6:20 p.m., March 10.
All these facts prove again that in contrast to the Armenian side, Azerbaijan is not observing the tripartite agreement on confidence-building measures reached in Sochi on 5 March and continues its provocative actions aimed at undermining the peace process.
Judging by the aforesaid, we assume that the Azerbaijani army is not controlled by the political leadership or executes their direct orders. We leave further inferences to the international organizations dealing with the peaceful conflict settlement," reads the statement.
