At least 170 people died on Monday in the explosion of a fuel tank in Nagorno-Karabakh, according to a new report published this Friday by local authorities.
“To date, a total of 170 remains have been found and transferred to the forensic medicine department,” local police told the official Armenian news agency Armenpress.
The previous report from the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities counted 70 dead in the explosion of the fuel depot in Stepanakert, the capital of this predominantly Armenian region.
According to information provided today by local police, the remains will be transported to Armenia for identification through DNA analysis.
According to the source, some 105 people are still missing, in addition to almost 300 injured in the incident.
Many of the injured had to be transported to Armenia for treatment in burn units.
Around 85,000 inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh fled their homes this last week, representing more than 70% of the population that previously inhabited this separatist territory belonging to Azerbaijan, but with an Armenian majority.
Last Tuesday, Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military operation in this Azerbaijani territory with a majority Armenian population, which according to the separatists caused two hundred deaths and more than four hundred injuries.
The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, with a majority Armenian Orthodox Christian population, declared independence from Muslim Azerbaijan after a war in the early 1990s that left around 30,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
As a result of this conflict, a ceasefire was signed in 1994 and mediation by the Minsk Group (Russia, France and the United States) was accepted, established within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). , but armed skirmishes remained frequent. and caused serious clashes in 2018.
About two years later, in the fall of 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed for six weeks for control of the enclave during a new war and with a severe defeat for Armenia, which lost a significant part of the territories it had controlled for three decades. .
Source: TSF
