What Does Azerbaijan Aim to Achieve with the March 5 Terror Attack? - Pashinyan

On March 5, the attack by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces on a police vehicle in Nagorno-Karabakh can hardly be termed anything other than a terrorist act, stated Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during today’s cabinet meeting.

Pashinyan emphasized that Azerbaijan has several objectives with this provocation on March 5. The first is to thwart negotiations concerning Nagorno-Karabakh and to create grounds for further military provocations. The second objective, according to the Prime Minister, is to fabricate false evidence claiming that weapons and ammunition are being transported from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh.

“This topic is particularly important for Azerbaijan following the International Court of Justice’s decision on February 22, which unequivocally and categorically rejected Azerbaijan’s request for provisional measures against Armenia, where Azerbaijan accused Armenia of conducting landmine operations,” he said, adding that this rejection by the court undermined Azerbaijan's accusations regarding alleged mine-laying activities by Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been raised in all international platforms.

Pashinyan noted that Azerbaijan failed to present the shot-up vehicle in this context since the police UAZ vehicle was not moving towards Stepanakert but had just exited from it. The trajectory of the vehicle’s motion had also been recorded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs surveillance cameras in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Azerbaijan’s next significant goal was to create new narratives with bloody terrorism, generating new streams of information that would obscure a crucial fact: that Azerbaijan is blatantly failing to comply with the decision of the world’s highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, regarding the opening of the Lachin corridor,” stated the Prime Minister.

Pashinyan emphasized that the incident underscores the necessity of sending an international fact-finding mission to Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor to prevent new aggression from Azerbaijan and its evident preparations for ethnic cleansing and genocide against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.

It is noteworthy that on the morning of March 5, around 10:00 AM, a group of Azerbaijani armed forces targeted and opened fire on the vehicle transporting personnel of the police's passport and visa department in a location known as “Khaypalou.” Three police officers were killed, and one was injured. Baku, in turn, reported the deaths of two Azerbaijani servicemen.