zerbaijani officials seem to be continuing to compete with one another as to who will make the most controversial statement in connection with Azerbaijan’s unprecedented aggression against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) Air Force helicopter.  

Within the past one week since the chopper’s downing, the Azerbaijani side has put forward a variety of hypotheses—including, the helicopter was “trying to attack,” and it was “attacking,” on the Azerbaijani positions—as to why it had shot this helicopter down.

But Samad Seyidov, Head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), surpassed them all. According to him, the helicopter was “assaulting on Azerbaijani civilians.”

So, what remains for us is to guess what the “civilians” were doing at the military positions.

The Azerbaijani armed forces violated the ceasefire and shot down an NKR Air Force helicopter on November 12. The chopper was downed during a training flight, and it crashed nearby the Karabakh-Azerbaijan Line of Contact. As a result, three pilots are believed to have been killed: the commander of the helicopter, Major Sergey Sahakyan, as well as Senior Lieutenant Sargis Nazaryan and Lieutenant Azat Sahakyan. Information was disseminated some time thereafter, however, that a member of the helicopter crew may still be alive. There were no weapons in the chopper. The adversary, on the other hand, continues to fire intensive shots toward the crash site, thus, not allowing access to the area.