Photographs released by the ministry suggest that a bullet flew through a window and struck a mirror in a house bedroom. Ruben Khachatrian, a 73-year-old resident of the village of Khoznavar, said he slept there during the incident.
“I had put my phone on the nightstand,” Khachatrian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Thursday. “When I heard the noise I first thought that the phone fell to the ground. But when I stretched my hand I realized that the phone is in the same place. My wife was in the kitchen at that point.”
On Monday, gunshots damaged another house in Khoznavar. European Union monitors deployed in the area said they were “possibly” fired from nearby Azerbaijani army positions. A cultural center in the nearby village of Khnatsakh came under similar fire on April 14.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian condemned through a spokeswoman the ceasefire violations and urged Azerbaijani authorities to “investigate these cases and provide clarifications.”
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said later on Thursday that its troops did not open fire at Khoznavar. It claimed that they never target civilians or civilian infrastructure.
Residents of Khnatsakh and Khoznavar have reported nightly gunfire from Azerbaijani army positions for almost a month. It began days after Azerbaijan started accusing Armenian troops of violating the ceasefire regime on a regular basis. The accusations denied by the Armenian military followed official announcements on March 13 that the two conflicting sides have bridged their differences on the text of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
The Azerbaijani leadership has made clear that it will not sign the treaty without securing more Armenian concessions. Armenian opposition figures and pundits have suggested that the truce violations are aimed at forcing Yerevan to make those concessions or preparing the ground for a large-scale military attack on Armenia.
