Azernews.Az

By Vafa Ismayilova

The Azerbaijani Prosecutor General's Office has ruled out the allegations about the mine that killed three on June 4 had been planted by Armenian troops in Kalbajar region after the 44-day war.

In a statement, posted on its website on June 7, the Prosecutor-General's Office dismissed the relevant reports circulated in some media outlets and social media pages as inaccurate and unfounded.

"The infiltration of enemy subversive groups and the planting of mines there are excluded as the preliminary investigation revealed that the Azerbaijani armed forces had full control over the area of ​​the incident... It has also been established that Armenian illegal armed groups used the road during the occupation as a way to secure battle positions and they mined the areas they retreated while leaving Kalbajar region," the statement said.

The Prosecutor-General's Office added that an inspection of the scene of the incident by specialists found a crater (240 x 230 cm) with a depth of 97 centimeters and a KAMAZ car which got completely unusable. It stressed that an anti-tank mine buried at a depth of 60-97 cm caused the deadly incident.

The Prosecutor-General's Office explained the lack of any fragment of the exploded mine in the scene with the fact that it was a plastic, fabric or bodyless anti-tank mine, of fugue (armored) type used against caterpillars of tanks and armored vehicles and designed for installation on roads and in places where vehicles can move.

"It is assumed that the detonated mine is an anti-tank mine of TM-62P2, TM-62P3, TM-62T or TM-62B type (belonging to the same group) and is likely to explode as a result of a bus passing over it," the statement added.

The statement noted that the investigation of a criminal case earlier filed into the killing of three people (two journalists and one official) and the wounding of four in a mine explosion in Kalbajar region's Sususzlug village by the Military Prosecutor's Office is under way.

Armenia continues to refuse to provide maps of hundreds of thousands of mines it had planted on the Azerbaijani territories over three decades of occupation.

Azerbaijan has made numerous appeals to international organizations and lodged an intergovernmental complaint to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over Armenia's refusal to provide maps of mines in the formerly occupied territories.

President Ilham Aliyev on April 20 said that Armenia’s refusal to provide mine maps amounts to another war crime committed by Yerevan. He also said that demining of the newly-liberated territories will be the first stage in the process to return Azerbaijani IDPs to their homes.

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