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www.justiceforkhojaly.org
Elif Kaban, a Reuter correspondent in Aghdam, reported that after a massacre on Wednesday, Azeris were burying
scores of people who died when Armenians overran the town of Khojaly, the second-biggest Azeri settlement in the
area. “The world is turning its back on what’s happening here. We are dying and you are just watching”, one mourner
shouted at a group of journalists
By Helen Womack
The Independent, 29 February 1992
The gruesome extent of February’s killings of Aze-
ris by Armenians in the town of Khojaly is at last
emerging in Azerbaijan - about 600 men, women
and children dead.
The State Prosecutor, Aydin Rasulov, the cheif in-
vestigator of a 15-man team looking into what Azer-
baijan calls the “Khojaly Massacre”, said his figure
of 600 people dead was a minimum on preliminary
findings. A similar estimate was given by Elman
Memmedov, the mayor of Khojaly. An even high-
er one was printed in the Baku newspaper Ordu in
May - 479 dead people named and more than 200
bodies reported unidentified. This figure of nearly
700 dead is quoted as official by the Ministry of De-
fence of Azerbaijan.
Franсois Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the
International Red Cross in Baku, said the Muslim
imam of the nearby city of Aghdam had reported
a figure of 580 bodies received at his mosque from
Khojaly, most of them civilians. “We did not count
the bodies. But the figure seems reasonable. It is no
fantasy”, Mr. Zen Ruffinen said. “We have some
idea since we gave the body bags and products to
wash the dead”.
Mr. Rasulov endeavours to give an unemotional
estimate of the number of dead in the massacre.
“Don’t get worked up. It will take several months
to get a final figure”, the 43-years-old lawyer said at
his small office.
Mr. Rasulov knows about these things. It took him
two years to reach a firm conclusion that 131 people
were killed and 714 wounded when Soviet troops
and tanks crushed a nationalist uprising in Baku in
January 1990.
The Independent, 12 June 1992, “Painful search”