YEREVAN. – “In actual fact, Azerbaijan’s [human] casualties are many, and so many that they have dismissed the commander of the brigade. It’s interesting whether they have dismissed him for these casualties, or for shooting the helicopter.”     
The Armenian defense minister’s press secretary, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, has commented the aforesaid in his Facebook account.  
The Azerbaijani armed forces violated the ceasefire and shot down a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) Air Force helicopter on November 12. The chopper was downed during a training flight, and it crashed very close to the Karabakh-Azerbaijan Line of Contact. As a result, three pilots were killed: the commander of the helicopter, Major Sergey Sahakyan, as well as Senior Lieutenant Sargis Nazaryan and Lieutenant Azat Sahakyan. The adversary, on the other hand, was firing intensive shots toward the crash site, thus, not allowing access to the area. But the remains of these three military servicemen plus some necessary parts of the chopper were removed from the helicopter’s crash site through a special operation by the NKR armed forces, in the early morning hours on Saturday.
anna ghazaryan