bAccording to the government of the self-proclaimed republic, 68 people died in the explosion of a fuel depot in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus. The Interfax Azerbaijan news agency even spoke of 125 deaths on Tuesday evening and cited the Armenian Ministry of Health. The bodies were brought to Armenia, it said. In addition, 290 people are said to have been injured and 105 are still missing.
The cause of the explosion was still unclear. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced the delivery of medicines to Nagorno-Karabakh. However, according to the IRK, overcrowded hospitals and traffic jams caused by the exodus of ethnic Armenians are a problem.
Many people are currently leaving Nagorno-Karabakh – mostly in cars and buses. On Monday, the leadership of the enclave in Azerbaijan announced that anyone who wanted to travel to Armenia after Azerbaijan’s military operation last week could do so.
Free fuel for outbound travelers
There are traffic jams on the roads leading from Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies in the middle of Azerbaijan, to Armenia. The authorities of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh said that free fuel would be provided to those who wanted to leave.
According to the government in Armenia, more than 28,100 of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh have now arrived there. This is the status as of Tuesday 6 p.m. CEST, she announced in the evening. Nine hours earlier there were around 13,550 people who had entered Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan under international law, but is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, who largely controlled the region for three decades with the help of the Armenian government. Azerbaijan’s military attacked the area on Tuesday last week. A day later, ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh agreed to a ceasefire out of necessity.
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