Epress.am News from Armenia
On Mar. 20, on the proposal of the authorities of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic (NKR), the OSCE Mission had to hold a monitoring-investigation on the NKR and Azerbaijani armed forces’ Line of Contact near Akna settlement, Askeran direction, in connection with the death of NKR Defense Army serviceman Aharon Hayrapetyan who was killed on Mar. 17 by an Azerbaijani sniper in this section. The monitoring didn’t take place, due to Azerbaijan’s refusal, reads a release issued by the de-facto republic’s foreign ministry press service.
The OSCE Mission, headed by Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk, had to hold a unilateral investigation of the incident. Representatives of the NKR Ministry of Defense informed the monitoring group on the details of the violation of the ceasefire regime.
“A few minutes after the OSCE Mission’s departure, sniper shots were fired from the Azerbaijani side at the point where the investigation had taken place. Ambassador Kasprzyk was informed about this incident,” concludes the statement.
The disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan after a bloody war in the 1990s and is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians. Today it exists as a de-facto independent state under an uneasy ceasefire, and OSCE-brokered efforts to resolve its status have so far been unsuccessful.