State Minister Gurgen Nersisyan has said that the people of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) are hostages in the hands of the Azerbaijan.

“Baku's goal is to try to treat captives and hostages as it wants and to get what it can get from the captive, in this case, from the people of Artsakh,” Nersisyan said Monday, March 6.

The State Minister’s comments came one day after the Azerbaijani military ambushed and killed three Karabakh police officers and wounded another one.

“This is a terrorist act, with this the Azerbaijanis want to show that Artsakh cannot have contact with the outside world,” Nersisyan said.

He said that the international community and Azerbaijan should understand that the people of Artsakh will fight on their land until the end.

Three Karabakh police officers were killed and another wounded in an Azerbaijani armed attack on Sunday, March 5. They were ambushed by an Azerbaijani “sabotage squad” as they rode in a car outside Stepanakert.

Later in the day, the Armenia Foreign Ministry condemned Azerbaijan’s deadly shootings in Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) as an act of “terrorism” which it said was “preplanned and ordered by Azerbaijan’s supreme leadership.”