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The Public Relations Department of the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Artsakh has issued a comment over the July 4 provocation by Azerbaijan on various directions of the Artsakh-Azerbaijan contact line. The full statement is as follows:

“In the evening of July 4, 2017, the Azerbaijani side committed yet another provocation, firing at the territory of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic). For the first time since the April aggression in 2016, the armed forces of Azerbaijan employed TR-107 multiple rocket launcher system. The fire was launched from the positions located in close proximity to residential buildings in Alkhanlu village․

The Defense Army of Artsakh was forced to take countermeasures to suppress the fire activity of the Azerbaijani army. The incident provoked by the Azerbaijani side, unfortunately, led to casualties among the villagers.

Since the April aggression up to now, we have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that the Azerbaijani side, in violation of all the norms of international humanitarian law, does not disdain to use its civilian population as a human shield for shelling the territory of Artsakh.

The peaceful population on both sides of the border has long become a hostage to the Azerbaijani authorities’ policy of constant escalation of tensions on the Line of Contact between the armed forces of Artsakh and Azerbaijan and sabotaging the efforts of the mediators to restore the negotiation process.

The incident once again confirms the importance of the agreements reached at the summits of May 16, 2016 in Vienna and of June 20, 2016 in St. Petersburg, aimed at the stabilization of the situation on the Line of Contact. The immediate implementation of these agreements, torpedoed by Azerbaijan, will allow to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future.”

To note, earlier Artsakh Defense Ministry spokesman Senor Hasratyan expressed regrets over the death of an Azeri child targeted by the Azerbaijani Army.

“There is no child enemy, especially…a two-year-old one, however there are cases when a child is killed by the fault of brainless people. Such an incident occurred in the evening of July 4, when Azerbaijan’s ‘powerful’ army, hidden behind its peaceful civilians, fired from multiple launch rocket systems towards the Armenian forces, thus targeting no one other than a two-year-old girl. Unlike our neighbors with Neolithic thinking, we admit it with pain and express regrets over it. Accept this as a personal opinion,” he noted in a post on Facebook.