3 Killed, 24 Hurt as Armenians Fire on Convoy

Armenian militants ambushed a convoy of vehicles in a disputed region of Azerbaijan, killing three people and wounding 24 in an ensuing gunfight with the convoy’s Soviet troop escort, the official Tass news agency said Thursday.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, informed of the attack while presiding over the 28th Communist Party Congress in Moscow, told delegates that ethnic bloodshed in the region must come to an end.

The 17-vehicle convoy, which included a bus carrying Azerbaijani passengers, was attacked near the village of Charektar in Nagorno-Karabakh, the mostly Christian Armenian enclave that is located in and administered by Azerbaijan.

Tass said heavily armed Armenian militants stopped the convoy, guarded by five busloads of Interior Ministry troops, and opened fire. The soldiers returned the fire.

The news agency said two people--an Azeri military officer and a Russian soldier--died in the exchange and that a woman passenger died later of gunshot wounds.

Gorbachev read out the report on the shoot-out, then said that Azerbaijani delegates to the congress were justified in their demand that the Soviet leadership “put a stop to the outrage of unlawfulness and bloodshed.”

At least 200 people have died in ethnic violence that has besieged Armenia and Azerbaijan for the last two years. The dispute is centered on Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia wants the enclave attached to its territory, but mostly Muslim Azerbaijan has refused to relinquish control.