Azerbaijan says officer killed along Nagorno-Karabakh ‘line of control’

Associated Press Worldstream
November 8, 2004 Monday 10:17 AM Eastern Time

BAKU, Azerbaijan — An Azerbaijani army officer was killed in firing
along the no man’s land separating the country’s military from
ethnic Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding territory,
Defense Ministry spokesman Ilgar Verdieyv said Monday.

He said the officer died Sunday in the Agdam region. Agdam is
a destroyed, deserted city within territory occupied by ethnic
Armenian forces.

Armenian forces drove the Azerbaijani army out of Nagorno-Karabakh,
an ethnic Armenian enclave, in the 1990s and took control of several
areas outside the enclave as well. Since a 1994 cease-fire, the sides
have been separated by the so-called “line of control,” a demilitarized
buffer zone, but occasional shooting breaks out and each side accuses
the other of mounting small incursions.

Negotiators under the auspices of the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe are trying to work out an agreement on
Nagorno-Karabakh’s final status, but no visible progress has been made
in recent years and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev has repeatedly
raised the prospect of military action if no negotiated solution
is reached.

Also Monday, an Armenian organization issued an appeal to the OSCE
negotiators to press Azerbaijan for information about Armenians and
Nagorno-Karabakh residents who disappeared during the conflict.

The appeal did not specify how many such people are believed held,
but other estimates have placed the number at several hundred.