Reference: http://www.ataa.org/reference/media_az.html


The Washington Times, 3 March 1992
"ATROCITY REPORTS HORRIFY AZERBAIJAN"

The Independent (London), 12 June 1992

The Independent, London, 12 June 1992

BBC1 Morning News at 07:37, Tuesday, 3 March 1992

BBC1 Morning News at 08:12, Tuesday, 3 March 1992

Le Mond, 14 March 1992

The Boston Globe, 3 March 1992

Kommersant (Moscow) 27 February, 2002

Svoboda, 12 June 1992
"A TRAGEDY WHOSE PERPETRATORS CANNOT BE VINDICATED"

The Times, 3 March 1992
"MASSACRE UNCOVERED"

The Sunday Times, 8 March 1992

The Times, 3 March 1992
"BODIES MARK SITE OF KARABAGH MESSACRE"

The Age (Melbourne), 6 March 1992

Newsweek, 16 march 1992
"THE FACE OF A MASSACRE"

Time, 16 March 1992
"MASSACRE IN KHOJALY"



The Washington Times, 3 March 1992
"ATROCITY REPORTS HORRIFY AZERBAIJAN"
By Brian Killen, Agdam, Azerbaijan

Dozens of bodies lay scattered around the killing fields of Nagorno-Karabakh yesterday, evidence of the worst massacre in four years of fighting over the disputed territory.
Azerbaijani officials who returned from the scene to this town about nine miles away brought back three dead children, the backs of their heads blown off.
At the local mosque, six other bodies lay stretched out, fully clothed, with their limbs frozen in the positions in which they were killed. Their faces were black from the cold.
" Telman!" screamed one woman, beating her breast furiously over the body of her dead father, who lay on his back with hiss stiff right arm jutting into the air.
Those who returned from a brief visit by helicopter to Khojaly, captured by the Armenians last week, said they had seen similar sights - only more. One Russian journalist said he had counted about 30 bodies within a radius of 50 yards from where the helicopter landed.
Armenia has denied atrocities or mass killings of Azerbaijanis after its well-armed irregulars captured Khojaly, the second-biggest Azerbaijani town in Nagorno-Karabakh, last Wednesday. Azerbaijan says 1,000 people were killed.
"Women and children had been scalped ", said Assad Faradzhev, an aide to Karabakh's Azerbaijani governor.
Mr. Faradzhev said the helicopter, bearing Red cross markings and escorted by two MI-24 helicopters of the former Soviet army, succeeded in picking up only THE THREE CHILDREN BEFORE Armenian militants opened fire. "When we began to pick up bodies, they started firing at us", he said.
Mr. Faradzhev said they were on the ground for only 15 minutes.
"The combat helicopters fired red flares to signal that Armenians were approaching and it was time to leave. I was ready to blow myself up if we were captured", he said pointing to a grenade in his coat pocket.
Reuters photographer Frederigue Lengaingne saw two trucks full of Azerbaijani corpses near Agdam.
"In the first one, I counted 35, and it looked as though there were almost as many in the second. Some had their heads cut off and many had been burned. They were all men, and a few had been wearing khaki uniforms", she said.
In Agdam's mosque, the dead bodies lay on mattresses under a naked light bulb. People screamed insults at Azerbaijan's president, Ayaz Mutalibov, saying he had not done enough to protect Karabakh's Azerbaijani population.
Hundreds of people crowded outside chanting Islamic prayers. Some wept uncontrollably and collapsed near their dead relatives, brought to the town by truck only minutes earlier.
Chilling film of dozens of stiffened corpses scattered over a snowy hillside backed accounts of the slaughter of women and children sobbed out by refugees who made it safely put of the disputed Cucasus enclave.
Azerbaijani television showed pictures of one truckload of bodies brought to the Azerbaijani town of Agdam, some with knives or their eyes gouged out. One little girl had her arms stretched out as if crying for help.
"The bodies are lying there like flocks of sheep. Even the fascists did nothing like this", said Agdam militia commander Rashid Mamedov, referring to the Nazi invaders in World War II. "Give us help to bring black the bodies and show people what happened", Karabakh Gov. Musa Mamedov pleaded by telephone to the Soviet army base in Gyandzha, Azerbaijan's second-largest city. A helicopter pilot who took cameamen and Westren correspondernts over the area reported seeing some corpses lying around Khojaly and dozens more near the Askeran Gap, a mountain pass only a few miles from Agdam.



The Independent (London), 12 June 1992
By Frederique Lengaigne/Reuter

Aref Sadikov sat quietly in the shade of a café-bar on the Caspian Sea esplanade of Baku and showed a line of stitches in his trousers, torn by an Armenian bullet as he fled the town of Khojaly just over three months ago, writes Hugh Pope.
" I' m still wearing the same clothes, I don't have any others", the 51-years-old carpenter said, beginning his account of the Khojaly disaster. " I was wounded in five place, but I am lucky to be alive". Mr. Sadikov and his wife were short of food, without electricity for more than a month, and cut off from helicopter flights for 12 days they sensed the Armenian noose was tightening around the 2,000 to 3,000 people left in the straggling Azerbaijani town on the edge of Karabakh.
"At about 11 pm a bombardment started such as we had never heard before, eight or nine kinds of weapons, artillery, heavy machine-guns, the lot", Mr. Sadikov said.
Soon neighbors were pouring down the street from the direction of the attack. Some huddled in shelters but others started fleeing the town, down a hill, through a stream and through the snow into a forest on the other side.
To escape, the townspeople had to reach the Azerbaijani town of Aghdam about 15 miles away. They thought were going to make it, until at about dawn they reached a bottleneck between the two Azerbaijani villages of Nakhchivanik and Saderak.
"None of my group was hurt up to then... Then we were stopped by acar on the road and the Armenian outposts started opening fire", Mr. Sadikov said only 10 people his group of 80 made it through, including his wife and militiaman son. Seven of his immediate relations died, including his 67-years old elder brother.
"I only had time to reach down and cover his face with his hat", he said, pulling his own big flat Turkish cap over his eyes. "We have never got any of the bodies back".
The first groups were lucky to have the benefit of covering fire. One hero of the evacuation, Alif hajiyev was shot dead as he struggled to change a magazine while covering the third group's crossing, Mr. Sadikov said.
Another hero, Elman Memmedov, the mayor of Khojaly, said he and several others spent the whole day of 26 February in the bushy hillside, surrounded by dead bodies as they tried to keep three Armenian armored personnel carriers at bay.
As the survivors staggered the last mile into Agdam, there was little comfort in a town from which most of the population was soon to flee.
"The night after we reached the town there was a big Armenian rocket attack. Some people just kept going," Mr Sadikov said. "I had to get to the hospital for treatment. I was in a bad way. They even found a bullet in my sock."
Victims of massacre: An Azeri woman mourns her son, killed in the Hojali massacre in February (left). Nurses struggle in primitive conditions (centre) to save a wounded man in a makeshift operating theatre set up in a train carriage. Grief-stricken relatives in the town of Agdam (right) weep over the coffin of another of the massacre victims. Calculating the final death toll has been complicated because Muslims bury their dead within 24 hours.



The Independent, London, 12 June 1992

The gruesome extent of February's killings of Azeris by Armenians in the town of Hojali is at last emerging in Azerbaijan - about 600 men, women and children dead.
The State Prosecutor, Aydin Rasulov, the cheif investigator of a 15-man team looking into what Azerbaijan calls the "Hojali 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 Hojali. An even higher 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 Leila Yunusova, the new spokeswoman of the Azeri Ministry of Defence.
FranCois Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the International Red Cross in Baku, said the Muslim imam of the nearby city of Agdam had reported a figure of 580 bodies received at his mosque from Hojali, 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 endeavors 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-year-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.
Officially, 184 people have so far been certified as dead, being the number of people that could be medically examined by the republic's forensic department. "This is just a small percentage of the dead," said Rafiq Youssifov, the republic's chief forensic scientist. "They were the only bodies brought to us. Remember the chaos and the fact that we are Muslims and have to wash and bury our dead within 24 hours." Of these 184 people, 51 were women, and 13 were children under 14 years old. Gunshots killed 151 people, shrapnel killed 20 and axes or blunt instruments killed 10. Exposure in the highland snows killed the last three. Thirty-three people showed signs of deliberate mutilation, including ears, noses, breasts or penises cut off and eyes gouged out, according to Professor Youssifov's report. Those 184 bodies examined were less than a third of those believed to have been killed, Mr Rasulov said.
"There were too many bodies of dead and wounded on the ground to count properly: 470-500 in Hojali, 650-700 people by the stream and the road and 85-100 visible around Nakhchivanik village," Mr Manafov wrote in a statement countersigned by the helicopter pilot.
"People waved up to us for help. We saw three dead children and one two-year-old alive by one dead woman. The live one was pulling at her arm for the mother to get up. We tried to land but Armenians started a barrage against our helicopter and we had to return."
There has been no consolidation of the lists and figures in circulation because of the political upheavals of the last few months and the fact that nobody knows exactly who was in Hojali at the time - many inhabitants were displaced from other villages taken over by Armenian forces.



BBC1 Morning News at 07:37, Tuesday, 3 March 1992

BBC reporter was live on line and he claimed that he saw more than 100 bodies of Azerbaijani men, women and children as well as a baby who are shot dead from their heads from a very short distance.



BBC1 Morning News at 08:12, Tuesday, 3 March 1992

Very disturbing picture has show that many civilian corpses who were picked up from mountain. Reporter said he, cameraman and Western Journalists have seen more than 100 corpses, who are men, women, children, massacred by Armenians. They have been shot dead from their heads as close as 1 meter. Picture also has shown nearly ten bodies (mainly women and children) are shot dead from their heads. Azerbaijan claimed that more than 1000 civilians massacred by Armenian forces.



Le Mond, 14 March 1992

The foreign journalist in Aghdam saw the women and three scalped children with the pulled off nails among the killed people. This is not "Azerbaijani propaganda", but reality.



The Boston Globe, 3 March 1992
By Paul Quinn-Judge, Baku, Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan charged yesterday that Armenian militians massacred men, women and children after forcing themfrom a town in Nagorno-Karabakh last week.
Azerbaijani officials said 1000 Azerbaijanis had been killed in town of Khojaly and that Armenian fighters then slaughtered men, women and children fleeing across snow-covered mountain passas. Armenian officials distuped the death tolland dendied the massacre report.
Journalists on the scene said it was difficult to say exactly how many people had been killed in surrounding areas. But a Retures photographer said he saw two trucks filled with Azerbaijani corpses, and a Russian journalist reported massacre sites elsewhere in the area.
Azerbaijani officials and journalists who flew briefly to the region by helicopter recovered the bodies of three dead children who had been shot in the head, Reuters said, but Armenians prevented them from retrieving more bodies.
There were growing signs that many civilians were killed during the capture of Khojaly.
Footage shot by Azerbaijan Television Sunday showed about 10 dead bodies, including several women and children, in an improvised morgue in Agdam.An editor at the main television station in Baku said 180 bodies had been recovered so far. A helicopter flying over the vicinity is reported to have seen other corpses, while the BBC quoted a French photographer who said that he had counted 31 dead, including women and cgildren, some who appeared as though they were shot in the head at close range.
Meanwhile, the manyor of Khojaly, Elmar Mamedov, said at a news conference in Baku that 1000 people had died in the attack, 200 more were missing, 300 had been taken hostage, and 200 were injured. Armored personnel carriers of the 366th spearheaded the attack, Mamedov charged, and cleared the way for Armenian irregulars.


Kommersant (Moscow), 27 February, 2002

Over the night from 25 to 26 February1992 the Khojaly town (Nagorny Krabagh), inhabited mainly Azerbaijanis, was subjected to the massive attack from the Armenian side. The unit of the Russian 366th infantry guards regiment took part in the attack. As a result, 613 persons died, 487 wounded, 1275 imprisoned, 150 persons are missing. The Khojaly events have radically changed the nature of the conflict - afterwards the military operations.


Svoboda, 12 June 1992
"A TRAGEDY WHOSE PERPETRATORS CANNOT BE VINDICATED"

A report by Memorial, the Moscow-based human rights group, on the massive violations of human rights committed in the taking of Khojaly on the night of 25-26 February 1992 by armed units The report of Memorial on the massive violations of human rights committed in the taking of Khojaly says of the civilians' flight from the town: "The fugitives fell into ambushes set by Armenians and came under fire. Some of them nonetheless managed to get into Agdam: others, mostly women and children (exactly how many it is impossible to say), froze to death while lost in the mountains; other still, according to testimony from those who reached Agdam, were taken prisoner near the village of Pridzhamal and Nakhichevanik. There is evidence from inhabitants of Khojaly who have already been exchanged that some of the prisoners were shot. Around 200 bodies were brought into Agdam in the space of four days. Scores of the corpses bore traces of profanation. Doctors on a hospital train in Agdam on 181 corpses (130 male and 51 female, including 13 children): the finding were that 151 people shrapnel wounds and 10 from blows inflicted with a blunt instrument. The records of the hospital train in Agdam, trough which almost all the injured inhabitants or defenders of Khojaly passed, refer to 598 cases of wounds or frostbite (cases of frostbite being in the majority) and one case of live scalping".



The Times, 3 March 1992
"MASSACRE UNCOVERED"
By Anatol Lieven

More than sixty bodies, including those of women and children, have been spotted on hillsides in Nagorno-Karabakh, confirming claims that Armenian troops massacred Azerbaijani refuges. Hundreds are missing.
Scattered amid the withered grass and bushes along a small valley and across the hillside beyong are the bodies of last Wednesday's massacre by Armenian forces off Azerbaijani refuges. In all, 31 bodies could be counted at the scene. At least another 31 have been taken into Agdam over the past five days. These figures do not include civilians reported killed when the Armenians stormed the Azerbaijani town of Khodjaly on Tuesday night. The figures also do not include other as yet undiscovered bodies Zahid Jabarov, a survivor of the massacre, said he saw up to 200 people shot down at the point we visited , and refugees who came by different routes have also told of being shot at repeatedly and of leaving a trail of bodies along their path. Around the bodies we saw were scattered possessions, clothing and personnel documents. The bodies themselves have been preserved by the bitter cold which killed other as they hid in the hills and forest after the massacre. All are the bodies of ordinary people, dressed in the poor, ugly clothing of workers.
Of the 31 we saw, only one policeman and two apparent national volunteers were wearing uniform. All the rest were civilians, including eight women and three small children. Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women's arms.
Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.



The Sunday Times, 8 March 1992

Thomas Goltz, the first to report the massacre by Armenian soldiers, reports from Agdam. Khojaly used to be a barren Azeri town, with empty shops and treeless dirt roads. Yet it was still home to thousands of Azeri people who, in happier times, tended fields and flocks of geese. Last week it was wiped off the map.
As sickening reports trickled in to the Azerbaijani border town of Agdam, and the bodies piled up in the morgues, there was little doubt that Khojaly and the stark foothills and gullies around it had been the site of the most terrible massacre since the Soviet Union broke apart.
I was the last Westerner to visit Khojaly. That was in January and people were predicting their fate with grim resignation. Zumrut Ezoya, a mother of four on board the helicopter that ferried us into the town, called her community "sitting ducks, ready to get shot". She and her family were among the victims of the massacre by the Armenians on February 26.
"The Armenians have taken all the outlying villages, one by one, and the government does nothing." Balakisi Sakikov, 55, a father of five, said. "Next they will drive us out or kill us all," said Dilbar, his wife. The couple, their three sons and three daughters were killed in the massacre, as were many other people I had spoken to.
"It was close to the Armenian lines we knew we would have to cross. There was a road, and the first units of the column ran across then all hell broke loose. Bullets were raining down from all sides. we had just entered their trap."
The Azeri defenders picked off one by one. Survivors say that Armenian forces then began a pitiless slaughter, firing at anything moved in the gullies. A video taken by an Azeri cameraman, wailing and crying as he filmed body after body, showed a grizzly trail of death leading towards higher, forested ground where the villagers had sought refuge from the Armenians.
"The Armenians just shot and shot and shot," said Omar Veyselov, lying in hospital in Agdam with sharapnel wounds. "I saw my wife and daughter fall right by me."
People wandered through the hospital corridors looking for news of the loved ones. Some vented their fury on foreigners: " Where is my daughter,where is my son ?" wailed a mother. "Raped. Butchered. Lost."



The Times, 3 March 1992
"BODIES MARK SITE OF KARABAGH MESSACRE"

A local truce was enforced to allow the Azerbaijanis to collect their dead and any refugees still hiding in the hills and forest. All are the bodies of ordinary people, dressed in the poor, ugly clothing of workers. All the rest were civilians, including eight women and three small children. Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women's arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.



The Age (Melbourne), 6 March 1992
By Helen Womack, Agdam , Azerbaijan, Thursday

The exact number of victims is still unclear, but there can be little doubt that Azerbaijani civilians were massacred by Armenian Army in the snowy mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh last week.
Refugees from enclave town of Khojaly, sheltering in the Azerbaijani border town of Agdam, give largely consistent accounts of how Armenians attacked their homes on the night of 25 February, chased those who fled and shot them in the surrounding forests. Yesterday, I saw 75 freshly dug graves in one cemetery in addition to four mutilated corpses we were shown in the mosque when we arrived in Agdam late on Tuesday. I also saw women and children with bullet wounds in a makeshift hospital in a string of railway carriages.
Khojaly, an Azerbaijani settlement in the enclave mostly populated by Armenians, has a population of about 6000. Mr. Rashid Mamedov, Commander of Police in Agdam, said only about 500 escaped to his town."So where are the rest?"
Some might have taken prisoner, he said, or fled. Many bodies were still lying in the mountains because the Azerbaijani's were short of helicopters to retrieve them. He believed more than 1000 had perished, some of cold in temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees.
When Azerbaijani's saw the Armenians with a convoy of armored personnel carriers, they realized they could not hope to defend themselves, and fled into the forests. In the small hours, the massacre started. Mr. Nasiru, who believes his wife and two children were taken prisoner, repeated what many other refugees have said - that troops of the former Soviet army helped the Armenians to attack Khojaly. "It is not my opinion, I saw it whith my own eyes".



Newsweek, 16 march 1992
"THE FACE OF A MASSACRE"
By Pascal Privat with Steve Le Vine in Moscow

Azerbaijan was a charnel house again last week; a place of mourning refugees and dozens os mangles corpses dragged to a makeshift morgue behind the mosque. They were ordinary Azerbaijani men, women and children of Khojaly, a small village in war-torn Nagorno-Karabkh overrun by Armenian forces on February 25-26. Many were killed at close range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others were scaled. While the victims' families mourned.



Time, 16 March 1992
"MASSACRE IN KHOJALY"
By Jill Smolowe
Reported by Yuri Zarakhovoch/Moscow

While the details are argued, this much is pain: something grim and unconscionable happened in the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly two weeks age. So far, some 200 dead Azerbaijanis,many of them mutilated, have been transported out of the town tucked inside the Armenian-dominated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh for burial in neighboring Azerbaijan. The total number of deaths-the Azerbaijanis claim 1,324 civilians have been slaughtered, most of them women and children-is unknown.
Videotapes circulated by the Azerbaijanis include images of defaced civilians, some of them scalped, others shot in the head...