Turkish President Recep Tayyip Eroğan said that Turkey would continue to keep its border to with neighbour Armenia closed in the absence of a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue during his visit to Azerbaijan on Saturday, independent news site Diken reported.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which broke away from Azerbaijan in 1991 with Armenian military support, is the subject of ongoing dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
"Those who cannot explain what happened in Khojaly 26 years ago, the massacre in Upper Karabakh, and declare the killers heroes, should not give Turkey any kind of history lesson," Erdoğan said, in an apparent reference to Armenia during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Baku by the Caucasian Islamic Army.
The targeting of Azerbaijanis in the Khojaly massacre in 1992, during which 161 Azerbaijani civilians were killed by Armenian armed forces, and the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute led to the breakdown of relations between Armenia and Turkey in the early 1990s, with Turkey closing its border to Armenia in a show of support for Azerbaijan in 1993.