Komsomolskaya Pravda, 3 March 1992
We were given these photos by Oleg Aleksandrovich Litvin, a photographic correspondent of Khabar-Servis. He took them during the Khojaly tragedy. The first shows Major Alif Hajiyev, who was head of the town’s defence. The photo shows him still alive… He died leading a group of people out of crossfire. He leaves behind his Belarusian wife and two children.
And these boys, brothers, may be called lucky. They are alive in the hospital in Agdam. Two brothers with kindred bullet wounds – one wounded in the hand, the other in the chest.
And there are more and more graves here. But not all of the victims of that terrible night have been mourned and buried. It is difficult to extract corpses from the firing zone. Civilian memorial services have been held in mosques, Orthodox churches and synagogues in memory of those killed in Khojaly.
According to the latest reports from the Press Service of the President of Azerbaijan, over 300 hostages were taken during the operation by Armenian armed formations to capture the town. Between 500 and 1000 civilians trying to flee Khojaly were captured along the road to Agdam and some of them were killed. Tiny groups of people from Khojaly are breaking through to Agdam. Wounded and dead are being brought out of the combat operation zone. Meanwhile, fierce rocket and artillery fire is continuing upon Azerbaijani settlements in Karabakh – Lachin and Shusha. There are no communications with them.
R. Agayev, presidential press secretary, has said that numerous groups of Armenian armed formations with armoured equipment are concentrating on the Armenian side along a 120-kilometre-long sector of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.