Khojaly massacre by Armenia a genocide from legal point of view: Azerbaijani prosecutor

By Ruslan Rehimov

BAKU, Azerbaijan (AA) – The crimes committed by Armenian forces during the Khojaly massacre of 1992 legally constitute a “genocide,” according to a former Azerbaijani military prosecutor.

“When we evaluate it from a legal point of view, we see that a crime of genocide was committed … in Khojaly, just like in Srebrenica,” Col. Ilham Mammadov told Anadolu on the 31st anniversary of the violent attack in which hundreds of Azerbaijani citizens were killed by Armenian forces.

More than 600 people were killed in one of Armenia’s bloodiest assaults on Azerbaijani civilians in Karabakh, a region Baku reclaimed in November 2020 after nearly three decades of occupation.

Armenian forces took over the town of Khojaly on Feb. 26, 1992 after battering it with heavy artillery and tanks, assisted by an infantry regiment.

The two-hour Armenian offensive killed 613 Azerbaijani people, including 106 women and 63 children, and critically injured 487 others, according to Azerbaijani figures.

Some 150 of the 1,275 Azerbaijanis captured by the Armenians remain missing.

Mammadov said the violence in Khojaly meets all the definitions of genocide in international conventions.

“The consequences of the crimes committed provide us with a legal basis for characterizing this disaster as genocide,” he said.

“Because of factors such as being a planned action, perpetrated against civilians, for national and ethnic reasons, and the destruction of defenseless people, what happened in Khojaly can be described as genocide,” he added.

Mammadov said former Armenian Presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Robert Kocharyan were directly responsible for the atrocities in Khojaly, while Soviet forces in the region at the time also took part in the massacre.

All of them must face justice, he said.

He said former Armenian leaders have admitted “they did this … just because those people were Azerbaijanis.”

“The political leaders who ordered this genocide should be brought to justice,” he asserted.

* Writing by Burc Eruygur in Istanbul