BAKU, Azerbaijan (GDC) — A military helicopter crashed in Azerbaijan during a training flight on Tuesday, killing 14 people and wounding two more, Azerbaijani authorities said.
The helicopter of Azerbaijan’s State Border Guard service crashed on Tuesday morning during a flight over the Garaeybat training ground in the east of Azerbaijan, according to a joint statement of the border guard service and Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s office.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the crash, which the two state agencies are investigating.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mekhriban Aliyeva have extended their condolences to the families of the victims.
The incident came two weeks after Azerbaijan and neighbouring Armenia engaged in the worst fighting along their shared border since going to war last year over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The six-week war claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended in November 2020 with a Russian-brokered ceasefire. The deal saw Yerevan cede swathes of territory that it had controlled for decades.
Tensions between Baku and Yerevan have been running high since May, when Armenia said Azerbaijan’s military crossed its southern frontier to “lay siege” to a lake shared by the two countries.
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