PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan has repeatedly used widely banned cluster munitions in residential areas in Nagorno-Karabakh, Human Rights Watch said Friday, October 23. During an on-site investigation in Karabakh in October 2020, the organization documented four incidents in which Azerbaijan used cluster munitions.
“The continued use of cluster munitions – particularly in populated areas – shows flagrant disregard for the safety of civilians,” said Stephen Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch and chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition. “Cluster munitions should never be used by anyone under any circumstances, much less in cities, due to the foreseeable and unacceptable harm to civilians.”
A 69-year-old woman who was in her apartment on the fourth floor of a building next to where HRW observed scores of the distinctive impacts of the M095 submunitions said the building began to shake around 7:15 a.m.: “We saw that they had small pink things that were making them burn, so we ran down to the basement.”
The distinctive, ring-shaped, pre-formed fragments of an Israeli-made M095 submunition near a shop in Stepanakert.
At least one more LAR-160 cluster munition rocket was fired roughly into the same area several hundred meters away. HRW observed the remnants of a LAR-160 rocket, scores of the distinctive impacts of the M095 submunitions, the remnants of the pink-colored stabilization ribbons, and submunition fragments.
Body of a LAR-160 series Israeli-made rocket in a residential neighborhood in Stepanakert.
HRW also examined 35 photographs and one video shared directly with them from the town of Hadrut of a LAR-160 rocket and its fuse, impacts, and remnants of M095 submunitions that exploded, and dud submunitions that failed to explode in and around a home. According to the metadata of the media, they were recorded on Octob...
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