When Lachin was returned to Azerbaijan, Armenian state agencies purposefully destroyed and rendered houses unusable, said Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev.  

Aliyev made the remarks at an operational meeting held after the opening of the new administrative building of the Lachin district prosecutor's office on Thursday, News.Az reports.

The meeting was also attended by the Azerbaijani president’s special representative for the Lachin district, Masim Mammadov, prosecutors and military prosecutors of the districts liberated from the long-term Armenian occupation as a result of the Patriotic War in the autumn of 2020.

Aliyev noted that when Lachin was returned to Azerbaijan, Armenia’s state agencies deliberately rendered unusable or destroyed 1,511 out of 2,020 private houses.

Of the 27 apartment buildings, 19 were completely destroyed, and eight were damaged. Out of 190 administrative buildings, 143 were completely destroyed, and 47 were damaged.

In addition, everything possible was removed from the houses - the roof, floors, doors, and windows - and what could not be removed was damaged or burned. Armenia has done the same in the villages of Lachin.

Criminal cases were initiated on all these facts, the prosecutor general added.  

As part of the Great Return program to the liberated lands, the first group of Azerbaijani citizens returned to their homes in July 2022 decades after being forcibly expelled by the Armenian armed forces in the early 1990s. Azerbaijan continues to relocate Lachin residents to ancestral lands. The country plans to return to their native homes in the Karabakh and Eastern Zangazur economic regions about 2,000 families of IDPs by late 2023, that is about 10,000 people. Some 700 families are planning to return to the city of Lachin, and 400 families to the villages of Zabukh and Sus in the Lachin district.

News.Az