AZERBAIJAN CLAIMS CAPTURE OF ARMENIAN SPECIAL FORCES UNIT

Agence France Presse — English
April 29, 2008 Tuesday 1:31 PM GMT

Azerbaijan said Tuesday it has detained four members of an Armenian
special forces unit on its territory, but Armenia said the men were
being held after accidentally wandering on to Azerbaijani soil.

Azerbaijani Defence Ministry spokesman Eldar Sabiroglu said the men
had been detained in the ex-Soviet republic’s Nakhchivan region,
a small mountainous exclave of Azerbaijan wedged between Armenia,
Iran and Turkey.

"The defence ministry has prevented attempts to carry out provocations
on Azerbaijani territory by special forces of the Armenian military,"
Sabiroglu told AFP.

"This group of four men has been detained on the territory of
Nakhchivan and neutralised. An investigation is underway," he said. He
refused to provide any other details or say exactly when the men had
been captured.

Armenian Defence Ministry spokesman Seiran Shahsuvarian denied the
men had been conducting an operation in the region and said they had
been captured after getting lost following a visit to a friend in a
border village near Nakhchivan.

"On their way back they got lost and apparently found themselves on
the territory of Nakhchivan," Shahsuvarian said in a statement.

He said Armenia had appealed to the International Committee of the
Red Cross for assistance in having the men returned to Armenia.

Despite a 1994 ceasefire, Armenia and Azerbaijan remain officially
at war over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorny Karabakh, which
broke away from Azerbaijani control during a war in the early 1990s.

The dispute is unresolved after more than a decade of negotiations
and troops remain in a tense stand-off along the frontline between
Karabakh and the rest of Azerbaijan.

Shootings are common; up to 16 soldiers were killed in a clash
last month.

Nakhchivan is home to about 365,000 people who can only reach the
rest of Azerbaijan by plane or by transiting through Iran.

Armenian and Azerbaijani forces clashed in Nakhchivan during the
Nagorny Karabakh war, but there have been few reports of fighting in
the region since the ceasefire.