Azerbaijan hands over 15 Armenian prisoners in return for minefield maps

BAKU (Reuters) – Azerbaijan handed over 15 prisoners of Armenian origin to Armenia on Saturday in return for maps detailing the locations of 92,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said.

Ethnic Armenian and Azeri forces fought a bloody conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave last year that locked in territorial gains for Azerbaijan and was eventually brought to a halt by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.

In a statement on Saturday, Azerbaijan said that mediation by Moscow had helped it to obtain minefield maps from Armenia covering areas in the Fizuli and Zangilan regions in Nagorno-Karabakh.

It said it had released and handed over prisoners of Armenian origin who had served their sentences. It gave no details of who they were.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku and Anastasia Teterevleva in Moscow; writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Reuters