Baku: Iran averts adoption of int'l documents about Azerbaijani embassy terror attack

Baku has said that Iran sought to prevent widespread international exposure of the January 27 Azerbaijani embassy terrorist attack through international organisations it is a member of and decisions made by consensus and condemned this act by Tehran.

The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry made the remarks in a statement posted on its website on February 1, Caliber.Az reports.

"Iran has tried to prevent the terror attack from being widely exposed at the international level in the international organizations which it is a member of and in which decisions are consensus-based. In this regard, Iran objected to the draft communiqués and statements submitted by Azerbaijan to the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and to the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) immediately after the attack," the statement said.

The ministry recalled that on January 27, documents containing calls for international condemnation of the terror attack against the Azerbaijani embassy, the identification and prompt punishment of the organizers and perpetrators of the terror act, as well as for the fulfilment of obligations arising from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, were submitted to relevant international organisations and platforms for adoption.

It was noted that since the terror attack and until now, the armed attack on the embassy has been condemned by approximately 100 countries and the secretariats of a number of international organizations, and the need to punish those responsible has been emphasised in the statements.

The statement stressed that furthermore, "Iran has appealed to numerous countries for the support of its position in the aforementioned organisations, but support to Iran's position was given only by Syria and India among the 120 countries in the Non-Aligned Movement. The main claim voiced by these three countries in opposition to the adoption of the aforementioned documents was that terror attacks in individual countries were not condemned in the NAM before and bilateral issues between these countries were not brought to international platforms such as the NAM. However, the NAM has, in many cases, adopted a number of documents condemning the terror attacks that have occurred in its member states and emphasising the protection of diplomatic missions".

The ministry condemned this step by Tehran.

"We condemn this provocative step of Iran and state that it must comply with its international obligations. Azerbaijan will use all relevant international platforms to widely condemn the terror act against its embassy and punish the perpetrators of the said act," the ministry said.