Khojaly massacre to be marked in Turkey

BAKU/ANKARA

Turkish Interior Minister İdris Naim Şahin lays a flower on the monument to martyrs in Baku during a visit on Feb 23. Şahin says the Khojaly massacre was ‘a day of shame.’ AA photo

A memorial is scheduled to take place in Istanbul’s Taksim Square Feb. 26, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Khojaly massacre, as the Turkish Interior Minister said Turkey shares the sorrow and pain of Azerbaijanis.

Billboards and ads given by a group organized under the name “We are all from Khojaly” called on people to gather in Taksim at around 14:00 local time to protest the massacre, in which hundreds of civilian ethnic Azerbaijanis were killed and thousands suffered in the town of Khojaly in 1992.

Interior Minister İdris Naim Şahin said on a visit to Baku Feb. 23 that the Khojaly massacre was “a day of shame” in which children and women were massacred, Anatolia news agency reported. Şahin held meetings with Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev, Azerbaijani Interior Minister Ramil Usubov, Justice Minister Fikret Mamedov and Emergency Situations Minister Kemmalladdin Heydarov during his visit. On Thursday, a memorial took place at the Turkish Foreign Ministry to remember the victims of the Khojaly Massacre. Speaking at the memorial, Deputy Undersecretary Ambassador Fatih Ceylan said those who caused the massacre would always be prisoners in history and in their conscience.

In addition, the Turkey-Azerbaijan parliamentary friendship group has issued a statement on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the massacre. Necdet Unuvar, the head of the group, said Feb. 23 that those who had committed the massacre had not been punished yet. He said that 613 Azeri Turks - the majority of whom were women and children - were killed by Armenians in the town of Khojaly on February 25-26, 1992.