Previously Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan told that 108 remains of the killed in the first war were handed over to Azerbaijan, but the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry managed to twist even the humanitarian step of the Armenian side.

Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry pretended to hear about it for the first time and tried to use the humanitarian step of the Armenian side to escalate anti-Armenian sentiment.

“It is interesting why Armenia was waiting 30 years to provide any information about 4,000 Azerbaijanis who went missing during the first Armenia-Azerbaijan Karabakh war,” spokeswoman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Leyla Abdullayeva said.

“Although the Armenian government has not made any statements yet in this regard, among the reasons for the transfer of the remains of only 108 of thousands of missing Azerbaijanis after 30 years, of course, is the discovery of mass graves of Azerbaijanis in the liberated territories and the provision of the international community with evidence,” Abdullayeva said.

The spokeswoman added that proceeding from the principles of humanism, Azerbaijan handed over the remains of more than 1,700 Armenian servicemen to the opposite side immediately after the 44-day second Karabakh war without expecting any reciprocal step and without any information from the Armenian side about thousands of Azerbaijanis who went missing in the first Armenia-Azerbaijan Karabakh war.

“I would like to stress that the Azerbaijani side keeps the issue of missing people on the agenda as a priority and will not allow the Armenian side, which is directly responsible for this issue, to remain silent for 30 more years about the fate of more than 3,700 missing Azerbaijanis and the location of their mass burial places,” Abdullayeva said.

The head of the Foreign Ministry's press service is not only misrepresenting the humanitarian step taken by the Armenian side, but also deceiving it, to say the least. It was the Azerbaijani side which all these years refused to cooperate with the commissions for search of prisoners, hostages and missing people, and it was the Azerbaijani side which refused any contact with the state commission of the Nagorno-Karabakh, the graves are in the territory of the NKR, and it was the Azerbaijani side which refused to provide any information about the burial of about thousand Armenians from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh missing after the first war.

At the same time, the Azerbaijani side has been manipulating the data all these years - the data of the Azerbaijan State Commission on the missing people has varied in different years for political reasons, reaching up to 5,000.