Fourteen people were killed Tuesday when an Azerbaijani military helicopter crashes in the east of the Caucasus country, officials said.
14 people killed when military helicopter crashes
“Fourteen people died and two others were injured as a result of a state border service helicopter crash,” according to a statement from this organ of this former Soviet republic.
The text adds that 13 of the victims were military personnel.
The aircraft “crashed today, Tuesday, at around 10:40 local time (06:40 GMT) at the Garajeybat airfield in the Khyzy region while on a training flight,” the border guards service and the Azeri prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement.
An investigation was opened to elucidate why the helicopter crashed, according to the same source.
The incident came two weeks after deadly clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan threatened to derail a ceasefire that ended a war between the two over the past year, resulting in more than 6,500 deaths.
This latest fighting, which resulted in six deaths on the Armenian side and seven on the Azeri side, ceased thanks to Russian mediation.
Yerevan and Baku have been at loggerheads for years over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Populated mostly by Armenians supported by Yerevan, this mountainous region broke away from Azerbaijan after the collapse of the USSR, triggering a first war in the 1990s that left some 30,000 dead.
Tensions rose in May, when Armenia accused Azerbaijan of violating its borders to take control of land along Lake Sev, which the two countries share.
