Karabakh Furor Grows as Bodies Are Recovered : Civil war: Officials say at least 120 Azerbaijanis were killed in Armenian attack on the town of Khojaly.

As former Soviet troops seeking to pull out of the Nagorno-Karabakh war zone were attacked by Armenian militants and had to delay their departure on Tuesday, the furor built over Azerbaijani claims that 1,000 people died when Armenians stormed the Nagorno-Karabakh town of Khojaly.

Azerbaijani and Armenian accounts of the Khojaly incident contradict each other in almost every detail, down to the size of the town. The Armenians say Khojaly was a roadside village; the Azerbaijanis say it was a thriving city of 10,000 that has now been wiped out.

A few miles away, in Agdam, Azerbaijan--a city where riot police were patrolling--Western news agencies quoted authorities as saying they have recovered the bodies of 120 Azerbaijanis, allegedly killed as they fled the Armenian assault on Khojaly; the Azerbaijanis asserted that they were being blocked from retrieving more dead.

TV broadcasts on Tuesday showed the bodies of dozens of people, including women and children, scattered on hillsides outside Khojaly. Azerbaijani men with Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders sobbed as they collected the bodies, some of which had been mutilated.

A brick-and-wood one-story building next to Agdam’s mosque was transformed into a temporary morgue, housing four badly mutilated corpses Tuesday evening, the Associated Press said. Coffins were stacked up outside the morgue.

Sgt. Ilgar Aliev, a riot police officer, told the AP that the Azerbaijanis were having difficulty retrieving the dead because Armenian fighters were demanding gasoline and weapons before allowing the Azerbaijanis to take the bodies.

The Khojaly attack demonstrates just what many Nagorno-Karabakh residents say they fear will happen once the 366th Motorized Infantry Regiment, the last former Soviet unit in the region, withdraws, removing the last buffer between warring Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

The regiment’s departure was suspended Tuesday after one of its soldiers was killed in a shooting overnight and both Armenian militants and civilians moved to block the exit route.

The Khojaly incident also indicated that the Nagorno-Karabakh battles--which have heretofore claimed about 1,000 lives in four years of bloody dispute over the mountainous, fertile enclave--are escalating into a frightening new phase.

“If a whole city with all its inhabitants has really been erased from the face of the earth, then the war in Nagorno-Karabakh that was born of ethnic conflict has moved into its most terrible stage--a war for mutual extermination,” commented Izvestia, the main Russian afternoon newspaper.

Armenian spokesmen insist that Khojaly was inhabited mainly by Azerbaijani fighters who used the town as a base to rain down shells on the Armenian-populated capital of Stepanakert and to control its airport. Since Khojaly was taken, they say, much of the shelling of Stepanakert has ceased.

Reporting further bloodshed, Armenians said Tuesday that a helicopter carrying Armenian women and children was shot down by enemy fighters near the Azerbaijani town of Kelbadzhar; the Armenians asserted that 30 of their people were killed.