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Two Men Arrested In Armenia Accused Of Spying For Azerbaijan


Foreign military attaches visit an area in Armenia's Syunik Province where Armenian and Azerbaijani troops are locked in a border standoff on May 20.
Foreign military attaches visit an area in Armenia's Syunik Province where Armenian and Azerbaijani troops are locked in a border standoff on May 20.

YEREVAN -- Armenia's National Security Service says it has arrested two men on suspicion of spying for Azerbaijan, with which Yerevan recently fought a war over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The service said in a statement on June 7 that the two men, including a former military officer, had allegedly been recruited by Azerbaijani secret services while in Turkey and provided Azerbaijan with classified data related to military personnel in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to the statement, one of the suspects allegedly provided Azerbaijan with information about the Armenian troops and military equipment during last year's war, which claimed at least 6,900 lives.

There was no immediate comment from Azerbaijani officials.

Six weeks of fighting ended with a Moscow-brokered cease-fire in November as Baku regained control over some parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts.

In recent weeks, the two sides have blamed each other for a number of incidents along their border, putting pressure on the cease-fire in the run-up to Armenia's snap parliamentary elections on June 20.

Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but the ethnic Armenians who make up most of the region's population reject Azerbaijani rule.

Ethnic Armenian troops forced some 750,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis from areas in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s war, which claimed the lives of some 30,000 people, and ended in a cease-fire in 1994.

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