Secretary of State Commission reveals main points preventing determination of missing persons’ fate

"The ICRC was the main organization with which the State Commission cooperated during both the First Karabakh and the Second Karabakh wars. One of the most important tasks in this field was the clarification of the list of missing persons in the First Karabakh War," said Ismayil Akhundov, the Secretary and the head of the working group of the State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages, and Missing Persons, at the conference on "Identification of Missing Persons - Humanitarian Approach" dedicated to the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, on August 30, Report informs.

According to him, following the Framework Agreement on the Collection and Centralized Management of Ante-Mortem Data on Missing Persons signed between the Representation of the ICRC in Azerbaijan and the State Commission in April 2008, the biological (DNA) samples have been collected from the families of missing persons since 2014. During the past period, 10,309 biological samples were collected from family members of 3,315 victims. The work of extracting DNA profiles from the collected biological samples started in November 2021. For this purpose, profiles have been created for each of the 1,024 biological samples so far.

As he noted, the main points that prevent the determination of the fate of the missing people are that Armenia does not provide information about the burial places and the presence of numerous mines in the liberated territories: "According to information, more than 1 million landmines were buried by the Armenian military in the liberated territories".