Tuesday, October 29 2019 15:32

ArmInfo. Nagorno-Karabakh  conflict led to more than 4500 persons going missing in the whole  region. President of the International Committee of the Red Cross  (ICRC) Peter Maurer stated this in an interview with APA.

"The ICRC in Baku cooperates with the State  Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons. This  allows to perform one of the most important steps in the search of  missing persons, which is collection and preservation of vital  information needed for identification once the conditions will allow  for the exhumations to take place.  We always keep the focus on the  humanitarian goals, which are to give answers to families on the  whereabouts and fate of their loved ones and enable them to have  proper closure", said the head of the ICRC.  When asked if there was  any work being done to find unknown graves by the ICRC, Maurer said  that the State Commission for Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing  get information from different sources and register it.  We provided  training and technical support to them on the ways to document and  protect those sites.  ICRC support to the State Commission for  mapping graves/burials includes training relevant staff, development  of necessary tools for collecting and managing data, as well as the  processing and analyzing this information.  A lot of the work  consists of gathering different relevant sources, such as archive or  eyewitness accounts, of information on missing persons in a  systematic and organized manner, "he said.

The head of the ICRC also informed about the collection and  protection of information about missing persons, including the  collection of DNA samples. According to him, only in Azerbaijan today  from the ICRC biological samples have been taken in 39 cities and  regions from approximately 8031 close relatives of 2577 missing  persons.

Meanwhile, to clarify the Azerbaijani side on the reaction of Armenia  to the proposal of Azerbaijan, exchange Azerbaijani saboteurs Dilgam  Askerov and Shahbaz Guliyev to prisoner Karen Kazaryan and prisoner  of war Araik Kazaryan, in particular, said: "In a number of cases,  the parties to the conflict turn to the ICRC to act as a neutral  intermediary in the implementation of various humanitarian  initiatives. Often these issues are discussed privately and  bilaterally. The release of detainees is also relevant to these  issues.  In accordance with the ICRC's mandate, representatives of  the organization periodically visit persons detained in connection  with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to monitor the conditions of their  detention and their treatment, to enable them to contact families ".