Azerbaijan says soldier killed by Armenian sniper fire
Armenian forces killed an Azerbaijani soldier on Thursday, officials in Baku said.
BAKU (AFP) - Armenian forces killed an Azerbaijani soldier on Thursday, officials in Baku said, in the latest incident between the Caucasus arch-foes since their war last year over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Azerbaijan s defence ministry said in a statement one of its soldiers was killed Thursday evening by "sniper fire from illegal Armenian forces in Azerbaijani territory".
The statement said the Armenian troops were located in territory temporarily under the control of Russian peacekeepers, and that it had called on a joint Russian-Turkish monitoring mission to investigate.
That observer mission, based in Azerbaijan, was tasked last year with overseeing a Moscow-brokered ceasefire that brought to an end six weeks of fighting in November between the ex-Soviet countries.
News of the incident came as Armenia and Azerbaijan s foreign ministers were holding talks with Russia in Belarus on Thursday, aimed at mending ties.
The war for Nagorno-Karabakh last autumn claimed about 6,500 lives and saw Armenia cede territories it had controlled for decades, while Russia deployed peacekeepers in the area.
Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have since reported occasional shootouts along their shared border, sparking fears of another flare up in the territorial dispute.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed, and the ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.
