14 dead as military helicopter crashes during drills in Azerbaijan

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 An Azerbaijani military helicopter crashed on Tuesday during a training flight, killing 14 crew members and injuring two more, the South Caucasus country’s state border service said.
A man reacts as he stands near a house set on fire by departing ethnic Armenians, in an area that had been held under Armenian military control, in the village of Cherektar in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, Nov. 14, 2020. (Reuters Photo)
A man reacts as he stands near a house set on fire by departing ethnic Armenians, in an area that had been held under Armenian military control, in the village of Cherektar in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, Nov. 14, 2020. (Reuters Photo)

The media reports said a military helicopter belonging to the Azerbaijani State Border Service (SBS) crashed on Tuesday morning while performing training flights in the Garaheybat airspace in the Khizi region near Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.

As a result of the accident, many people lost their lives and several were injured, SBS said. According to several media outlets that cited the RIA news agency’s report, some 14 people died during the incident and two more were wounded.

“Today, at around 10:40 a.m. GMT, a military helicopter belonging to the State Border Service crashed during training flights in the Khizi region,” the statement read.

The SBS Command and the Attorney General’s Office are at the scene. A joint investigation is underway regarding the incident.

Following the incident, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu extended condolences to Azerbaijan. Çavuşoğlu also had a phone call with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov about the incident, diplomatic sources reported. In the call, he wished Allah’s mercy upon the “martyred” and a swift recovery to the wounded soldiers.

The incident came two weeks after Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia engaged in the worst fighting along their shared border since going to war last year over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The six-week war claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended in November 2020 with a Russian-brokered ceasefire. The deal saw Yerevan cede swathes of territory that it had controlled for decades.

Six Armenian troops and seven Azerbaijani soldiers were killed on November 16 in a flare-up in fighting. A truce was negotiated the same day by Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Tensions between Baku and Yerevan have been running high since May, when Armenia said Azerbaijan’s military crossed its southern frontier to “lay siege” to a lake shared by the two countries.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decadeslong dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that lies within Azerbaijan but was occupied by ethnic Armenian forces backed by Russia since a war there ended in 1994.

Source:dailysabah.com