STEPANAKERT (Sputnik) — The search for bodies of those killed during clashes in Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh will continue for at least another day, the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic's (NKR) presidential spokesman David Babayan said Saturday.
At April 9, the searches will take place between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Moscow time (12:00-15:00 GMT) on Saturday, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said.
"With mediation by the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the process of gathering the bodies of those killed on both sides on the contact line in Karabakh is planned between 15:00 and 18:00 Moscow time," the ministry said in a statement.
"Today, [the search] will also continue, and the process will probably go on for another one or two days, until fully complete," Babayan told RIA Novosti.
Additional security measures and a stricter ceasefire observation has been implemented ahead of body exchanges taking place between the sides, he added.
On Thursday, the NKR Defense Ministry said that the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army has lost a total of 36 servicemen killed and 122 wounded since the escalation of the conflict.
The violence in Nagorno-Karabakh escalated on April 2. Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of provoking hostilities that led to multiple deaths on each side.
The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh began in 1988, when the autonomous region sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, before proclaiming independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The warring sides agreed to a cessation of hostilities in 1994.
