Azerbaijan was pursuing several goals with the March 5 terrorist attack, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting of the Armenian government.

He added: "The first is the aborting of further negotiations with the representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh [(Artsakh)] and creating the necessary backdrop for a new military provocation. The foreign ministry of Nagorno-Karabakh made a statement yesterday, expressing readiness to continue the conversation with Azerbaijan; and this is an extremely important statement.

I believe it is necessary to create reliable international mechanisms so that an uninterrupted, institutional conversation takes place between Baku and Stepanakert, and this can become an effective guarantee for the implementation of the abovementioned international agreement.

The next goal of the March 5 provocation was to create false evidence that arms, ammunition are being transported from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. This topic is important for Azerbaijan, especially after the decision of the International Court of Justice on February 22, when the court clearly and unequivocally denied Azerbaijan's demand for temporary application against Armenia, by which Azerbaijan accused Armenia of carrying out landmines. With that denial, the groundless accusations for several months now against Armenia on the international platforms about the minefields collapsed; this was extremely important.

And Azerbaijan was trying to present the March 5 incident as proof of the transfer of weapons, ammunition from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, which failed for two reasons. First, the police UAZ [vehicle] was not going to [Artsakh capital] Stepanakert, but had left Stepanakert. Second, the Azerbaijani attack and also the trajectory of the UAZ from Stepanakert to the scene of the incident were recorded by the video cameras of the Nagorno-Karabakh Ministry of Internal Affairs, which made it obvious that there was nothing else in the  police car apart from the documents and registered weapons."

According to Pashinyan, the next important goal of Azerbaijan was to form new discourses and new information flows with bloody terrorism, which will cover a most important fact that Azerbaijan is openly not fulfilling the decision of the International Court of Justice regarding the reopening of the Lachin corridor.

"Let me remind that with a legally binding decision, the court has compelled Azerbaijan to take all measures within its power to guarantee the uninterrupted movement of people, vehicles, and cargo—in both directions—through the Lachin corridor. And this decision has not been implemented for 15 days, and this is solely the responsibility of Azerbaijan. On the contrary, Azerbaijan goes to new provocations to further aggravate the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Emphasizing all of this, the need to immediately send an international fact-finding mission to Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor becomes more and more urgent in order to prevent the unleashing of new aggression by Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan's obvious preparations to subject the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to ethnic cleansing and genocide, which is expressed by not fulfilling the decisions of international courts, keeping the Lachin corridor closed, launching military provocations and terrorist actions," declared the Armenian PM.

Also, he reaffirmed Armenia's desire to achieve peace in the region and its commitment to the peace agenda.