Azerbaijani authorities on Thursday said they unearthed two more mass graves in the Karabakh region, thought to belong to civilians killed by Armenians during the First Karabakh War.
A mass grave containing remains of five people was found during roadworks near Shusha, while another was found on the Khojaly road, containing the remains of at least seven people, the Azerbaijani State Commission for Captured, Missing and Hostage Citizens said in a statement.
The remains were haphazardly buried, the commission said, noting they found traces of torture on the bodies, which they believe belong to civilians killed by Armenian forces.
Over 4,000 Azerbaijani citizens became missing as a result of Armenian attacks on Azerbaijan during the First Karabakh War between 1988 and 1994. Azerbaijan’s official records still name at least 3,980 people as missing.
Armenia has refused to disclose any information about the mass graves or the fate of the missing, which includes 3,209 soldiers and 774 civilians.
Following the Second Karabakh War in 2020, Azerbaijan found 187 bodies in the mass graves, thought to belong to people who were lost. Moreover, remains of some 309 bodies were discovered during road and construction works in Karabakh. Authorities have identified 170 of the bodies.
Khojaly was also the site of a tragedy in February 1992 when Armenian forces trying to take over the town massacred 613 Azerbaijani civilians and seriously injured 487 others in a two-hour offensive. Some 150 of the 1,275 Azerbaijanis that the Armenians captured during what has now been called the Khojaly Massacre remain missing, while eight families were completely wiped out.
The Karabakh region had been the site of mass killings and burials since the First Karabakh War in the early 1990s, during which the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh – a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan – and seven adjacent regions, including Khojaly.
In the fall of 2020, in 44 days of fighting, Azerbaijan liberated several cities, villages and settlements in Karabakh from some 30 years of Armenian occupation.
After a series of slow-moving negotiations, Azerbaijan rushed troops in last September. It swiftly seized back Karabakh, whose entire population of nearly 120,000 people returned to Armenia after rejecting a reintegration program Baku offered.
Earlier in 2024, Armenia withdrew from several Azerbaijani villages it had controlled since the early 1990s as part of the peace process.
Both Baku and Yerevan separately announced an agreement on the draft of a peace deal last month amid reports of mutual border fire.
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