No:042/22, Chief of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Leyla Abdullayeva answers the media's question regarding the Armenian Prime Minister's statement on the return of the remains of Azerbaijani missing persons
Question: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, during his speech in the country's parliament, said that over the past year the remains of 108 Azerbaijanis who went missing in the first war have been handed over to the Azerbaijani side. We would like to know your attitude to this statement.
Answer: I wonder what was the reason that Armenia waited for 30 years to provide any information about the 4,000 Azerbaijanis missing in the first Armenia-Azerbaijan war? The Armenian government has not yet made any statement in this regard.
But certainly, the discovery of mass graves of Azerbaijanis in our liberated territories and the presentation of the evidences to the international community is among the reasons of the return of the remains of 108 out of the thousands of Azerbaijanis missing after 30 years.
We would like to remind that immediately after the 44-day war, Azerbaijan, without waiting for the reciprocity of the Armenian side and while Armenia did not provide any information about thousands of Azerbaijanis who were missing in the first Armenia-Azerbaijan war, handed over more than 1700 bodies of Armenian soldiers to the opposite side, based on the principles of humanism.
We would like to note that the Azerbaijani side keeps the issue of missing persons on the agenda as a matter of priority, and will not allow the Armenian side, which is directly responsible in this matter, to keep silence for another 30 years about the fate of more than 3,700 Azerbaijanis who went missing, as well as the places of mass graves.