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The Artsakh Republic Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport Lusine Gharakhanyan has met with young footballers of Lernayin Artsakh FC who had been illegally stoped by Azerbaijani military on the road in Vorotan. 

"The incident with the bus carrying the young footballers of Lernayin Artsakh FC is a classic example of terrorism. This reminded of the Beslan siege horror. At the same time the scene of Azerbaijani servicemen scrapping the Artsakh flag off the bus with a knife comes as another evidence of strong Amenophobia in Azerbaijan. Sport is not about politics, not to say about intimidation," the minister wrote on her Facebook. 

Gharakhanyan added that Armenian athletes have not yielded to the provocations of Turkish terrorists and will continue to achieve boundaries of the kind, the victory, strength and self-improvement. 

To remind, earlier Armenia’s Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) Arman Tatoyan reported that masked and armed Azerbaijani servicemen illegally stopped a civilian bus carrying a group of Armenian children on a road in Vorotan in Armenia’s Goris community to evidently intimidate them, 

The video shows the Azerbaijani servicemen checking the children’s phones under the pretext of finding some video footage. During that time, they also scraped the Artsakh flag off the bus with a knife,” the ombudsman said.