Turkish official calls on Armenia to accept Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan

Turkey has always protected the rights of Azerbaijan in every platform, and it will continue to do so, Turkey's parliament speaker said on Thursday.

"Armenia should give up its aggressive and expansionist attitude, and accept Nagorno Karabakh as an eternal Azerbaijani territory," Mustafa Sentop said in an opening ceremony of an exhibition on the 1992 Khojaly massacre.

Report informs, citing the Anadolu Agency, that Sentop called on the international community to have the same attitude with Turkey against the Nagorno Karabakh issue.

"Armenia should retreat from the territories in the Caucasus where it has occupied," he said.

Turkey maintains that any resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict should take into account Azerbaijan's territorial integrity.

Turkey and Armenia have no diplomatic relations.

The responsible ones have got away with the Khojaly massacre, Sentop also said.

He added that sooner or later, these murderers -- with blood on their hands -- will pay for what they did.

The 1992 Khojaly massacre is considered one of the bloodiest incidents committed by Armenian forces against Azerbaijani civilians for control of the now-occupied Nagorno Karabakh region.

The two-hour Armenian offensive killed 613 Azerbaijani citizens -- including 106 women, 63 children and 70 elderly -- and critically injured 487 others, according to Azerbaijani figures.

Also, 150 of the 1,275 Azerbaijanis that the Armenians captured during the massacre remain missing. In the carnage, eight families were utterly wiped out, while 130 children lost one parent, and 25 lost both.