Armenia has no right to accuse Azerbaijan for Sumgayit events – MFA

The accusations against Azerbaijan voiced in the statement of the Armenian Foreign Ministry over the events in Sumgayit are completely groundless and represent distortion and falsification of historical facts, reads a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh on the Foreign Ministry's statement regarding the Sumgayit events.

The statement of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, Hajizadeh said, "is an attempt to cover up Armenia's violent actions since the late 1980s to implement illegal territorial claims to Azerbaijan", accompanied by the occupation, deportation and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis.

Hajizadeh recalled that the ethnic riots in Sumgayit were a part of deliberate, planned and targeted provocations of the USSR and Armenian leadership, ideologists of Armenian chauvinism and extremist organisations.

The USSR Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal case on this fact, the perpetrators and persons involved in the riots were identified, as well as the 32 victims of the incident.

"The fact that there were 6 Azerbaijanis among the victims of the incident shows that these riots were not organised by the Azerbaijani population," Hajizadeh noted.

One of the active participants of the riots was ethnic Armenian Eduard Grigoryan, who killed 6 persons of Armenian nationality.

The Soviet court sentenced him to only 12 years of imprisonment; however, after the collapse of the USSR he was transferred to Armenia to serve his sentence and was released there.

As a result of the trial related to the Sumgayit events of 27-29 February 1988, 92 people were sentenced to prison terms and one person was sentenced to death penalty.

At the same time, no one was punished due to the forced expulsion of nearly 300.000 people from Armenia and the death of 200 Azerbaijanis in this republic.

Besides, no one has been brought to justice in Armenia for war crimes, including massacres of Azerbaijanis in Khojaly during the occupation of Azerbaijani territories, the official representative of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stressed.--