Azerbaijan discovered a mass burial site in the Sarıcalı village of its liberated city Aghdam, authorities revealed on Wednesday.
"Human bones were found on Nov. 22 following the excavation work carried out with the participation of police, prosecutor's office and security officials in the Sarıcalı village of Aghdam city, which was liberated from occupation," said a statement from the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry.
Aghdam is one of the seven districts surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan liberated from nearly 30 years of Armenian occupation in 2020.
The remains of the people killed and buried are estimated to be from 1992, according to the statement.
The bones recovered from the mass grave were sent for forensic examination to determine whom they belonged to.
The Karabakh region has been the site of mass killings and burials since the First Karabakh War in the early 1990s, among which the most notable has been the Khojaly Massacre by Armenian forces.
A two-hour Armenian offensive on the town of Khojaly killed 613 Azerbaijani citizens – including 106 women, 63 children and 70 elderly people – and seriously injured 487 others, according to Azerbaijani figures.
Some 150 of the 1,275 Azerbaijanis that the Armenians captured during the massacre remain missing, while eight families were completely wiped out.
Excavations have been ongoing in the region since February this year in an effort to find citizens who disappeared during the war, which ended in 1994. In October, Azerbaijan unearthed another mass grave in the Khojavand district, which revealed the remains of 12 Azerbaijani servicemen “tortured and executed” in the said period.
“Some 4,000 Azerbaijani troops and civilians remain missing since the war, and Armenia refuses to disclose the locations of mass graves,” a foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had said following the discovery.
Relations between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions-Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Qubadli and Zangilan.
In September, at least 286 people were killed on both sides before a U.S.-brokered truce ended the worst clashes since 2020 when Armenian attacks escalated into an all-out war.
It claimed over 6,500 lives in six weeks before a Russian-brokered cease-fire saw Armenia cede swathes of territory it had illegally occupied for decades. The peace agreement is celebrated as a triumph in Azerbaijan.
Most recently, Baku and Yerevan have been working to normalize relations and ink a peace deal under the auspices of both Russia and the U.S.
