At least three people were killed in a shootout between Azerbaijani troops and police in the separatist ethnic Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday, according to Armenia’s Interior Ministry.
Both sides gave different accounts of what happened. Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said the shootings occurred when troops went to check vehicles suspected of transporting weapons on a subsidiary dirt road leading from Armenia to Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia’s Interior Ministry described the shooting as an “ambush” and said that three officers from the region’s passport division were killed.
Azerbaijan said its military “suffered losses” but did not give specific numbers.
The conflict adds to already high tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which fought a war over Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 that killed more than 6,000 people. The war ended in a Russia-brokered armistice under which Armenia relinquished the territories surrounding the region.
Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan, but ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia have controlled the region and surrounding areas since 1994.
The 2020 agreement to end the war left as the only authorized connection between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia a winding road called the Lachin Corridor, a lifeline for supplies to the region’s roughly 120,000 people.
However, traffic on that road has been mostly blocked since December due to protesters supported by the Azerbaijani authorities.