YEREVAN -- Three Armenian helicopter crewmen who were killed when their military aircraft was shot down on November 12 by Azerbaijani forces have been buried with full military honors.
They were laid to rest at the Erablur Military Pantheon on November 25 after their bodies were moved from the Surb Sarkis Church in Yerevan, where President Serzh Sarkisian and other top officials attended a farewell ceremony on November 24.
Last week, authorities in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh said that the bodies had been retrieved from the crash site near a demilitarized zone between Azerbaijan and the separatist region by a special commando group.
The downing of the helicopter has added to tension between the neighboring countries over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenian-backed separatists seized mainly Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan during a war in the early 1990s that killed some 30,000 people.
Diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict have brought little progress.