Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijan on Saturday will exchange an Armenian citizen’s body with the bodies of two Azerbaijani servicemen killed in clashes this year, officials say.

The secretary of Azerbaijan’s State Commission on Captives, Hostages and Missing Persons Shahin Sayilov said the handover will take place at around 4 p.m. near Azerbaijan’s Aghdam district. Armenia will hand over the corpses of warrant officer Mubariz Ibrahimov and serviceman Farid Ahmadov, while Azerbaijan will repatriate the body of Gavrusha Arustamyan, who had gone missing.

Ibrahimov, 22, perished after killing four Armenian soldiers and wounding four others in a clash in June on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces. Ibrahimov was posthumously declared a National Hero by President Ilham Aliyev.

Farid Ahmadov, 24, was killed in the same part of the frontline in September while repelling an Armenian attack.

Gavrusha Arustamyan, 71, was killed in a village of the Aghdara region. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which works to facilitate the handover of captives, informed Azerbaijan in mid-May that Arustamyan had gone missing.

The presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a joint statement after talks in Astrakhan held with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s mediation on October 27 to swap prisoners of war and the bodies of soldiers. The first such swap took place on Thursday. Armenia handed over Azerbaijani citizen Eldar Taghiyev, a 47-year-old resident of the western Tovuz district, who was captured by the Armenian troops in late December 2009. Azerbaijan transferred the body of Armenian saboteur Manvel Saribekyan, who was seized in Azerbaijan on September 11 in an attempt by an intelligence group to cross the border and subsequently committed suicide in his prison cell.

Armenia and Azerbaijan waged a war in the early 1990s. Armenia still occupies part of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory. OSCE-brokered peace talks have been largely fruitless so far and sporadic clashes on the frontline continue.