Jet Lands Safely After Missile Attack Over Karabakh
A passenger plane evacuating wounded women and children from Nagorno-Karabakh was hit by a heat-seeking missile Friday, news reports said, but the pilot landed the burning jet safely.
The attack came as Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to extend for two weeks a cease-fire in the disputed region until peace talks can start, officials in both former Soviet republics said.
The cease-fire, brokered by Iran, began March 20 to allow U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance to visit the region and was to expire Friday.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmoud Vaezi on Friday shrugged off risks to the cease-fire posed by the attack on the plane.
The Yak-40 Aeroflot jet of Armenia’s fleet had just taken off from Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, when it was hit by a missile fired from Azerbaijan, said a spokesman for the Armenian Mission in Moscow. The plane was en route to the Armenian capital, Yerevan.
Kazaryan and the Armenpress news agency reported that the missile did not explode, but damaged an engine on the plane’s tail.
Firefighters at Yerevan’s airport put out a blaze that threatened the aircraft and 10 passengers suffered minor injuries, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass said.
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