STEPANAKERT. – “The efforts, by way of the international organizations, to come near the [crash] site of the downed helicopter and to find out the fate of the [helicopter] crew, yielded no results, and therefore we were obligated to resort to special operations.”

Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) Defense Minister Movses Hakobyan, who is also Commander of the NKR Defense Army (DA), on Saturday issued the aforementioned comment.

In addition, the NKR Defense Army has released a video depicting a graphic image of the route used for the removal of the bodies, and some other footage from the special operation.

“Azerbaijan rejected all these organizations and, also, they did not permit to conduct monitoring there. Conversely, they constantly attempted to keep that sector under fire and, since the helicopter was very close to their [military] positions, [they also attempted] to remove the dead bodies.

“[But] all these measures yielded no result. We were obligated to resort to special operations, and the DA special subdivisions have carried this out,” Hakobyan also commented.

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 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 Nagorno-Karabakh Republic armed forces.