By Paul Quinn-Judge, Globe Staff

Azerbaijan charged yesterday that Armenian militants massacred men, women and children after forcing them from a town in Nagorno-Karabagh last week. Azerbaijani officials said 1000 Azeris had been killed in town of Khojaly and that Armenian fighters then slaughtered men, women and children fleeing across snow-covered mountain passes.

Armenian officials disputed the death toll and denied the massacre report.

Journalists on the scene said it was difficult to say exactly how many people had been killed in surrounding areas. But a Reuters photographer said he saw two trucks filled with Azeri corpses, and a Russian journalist reported massacre sites elsewhere in the area.

Azeri officials and journalists who flew briefly to the region by helicopter recovered the bodies of three dead children who had been shot in the head, Reuters said, but Armenians prevented them from retrieving more bodies. In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, government officials said that communications with Shusha, the last Azeri foothold in Nagorno-Karabakh, were cut yesterday morning. The militant Azerbaijani Popular Front reported that Armenian troops backed by armor and artillery were moving closer to the town. Shusha was shelled again overnight, according to accounts reaching Baku yesterday.

Fighting over the enclave, administered by Azerbaijan but largely peopled by ethnic Armenians, has flared into a full-scale war over the last month. In the four years up to this January, some 1000 people are believed to have been killed in the conflict. Although figures from both sides are extremely unreliable, at least several hundred people have probably died in the past four weeks.

The Azerbaijani Popular Front has been predicting an attack on Shusha for the last two days. But information on the fighting inside the enclave cannot be confirmed independently, as the Azerbaijani side is reluctant to let journalists make what they say is the excessively dangerous trip into the area. Officials of both the Azerbaijan government and the Popular Front claim that the final attack on Shusha could be triggered by the withdrawal of the last units of the former Soviet army stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh, the 366th Regiment. The withdrawal began yesterday, said Maj. Gen. Nikolai Popov, commander of the Baku-based 4th Army, in a brief phone interview yesterday.

The Azerbaijan presidential press service, quoting the republic’s Ministry of National Security, claimed that commonwealth troops were going to move out through the town’s defenses as they did so.

Popov said he did not know if the regiment would leave through Shusha. Asked who might know this, he answered, “No one’s going to tell you.”  Commonwealth airborne units reportedly have been moved into Nagorno-Karabakh to cover the regiment’s withdrawal. Officials in Moscow and Armenia said that the 366th Regiment, based in the regional capital of Stepanakert, has been strictly neutral in the fighting. The same sources said the 366th has lost a number of mean dead and wounded during the intensive Azerbaijani rocketing of Stepanakert over the last few weeks.

Azeri sources, however, claim that the 366th has swung actively the side of Armenians, notably in the capture last week of the small town of Khohaly, on the road between Stepanakert and Agdam. There were growing signs that many civilians were killed during the capture of Khojaly. Footage shot by Azerbaijan Television Sunday showed about 10 bodies, including several women and children, in an improvised morgue in Agdam. An editor at the main television station in Baku said 180 bodies had even recovered so far. A helicopter flying over the vicinity is reported to have seen other corpses, while BBC quotes a French photographer who said that he had counted 31 dead, including women and children, some who appeared as though they were shout in the head at close range.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Khojaly, Elamr Mamedov, said at a news conference in Baku that 1000 people had died in the attack, 200 more were missing, 300 had been taken hostage, and 200 were injured. Armored personnel carriers of the 366th spearheaded the attack, Mamedov charged, and cleared the way for Armenian irregulars.

The Armenian Security Ministry denied that the Khojaly fighting had resulted in a high death toll. The attack was necessary to halt the rocketing of Stepanakert, Security Minister Valery Pogosyan told Reuters yesterday. If Shusha does indeed fall, its loss could send shock waves through Azerbaijani society.

“If we lose this war there will be another one, very quickly,” an Azeri businessman predicted yesterday.

An Azeri woman mourns her slain father in Agdam (AP photo)

Publication date 03/03/1992

Courtesy of Karabagh Truths platform