Armenians direct water to flood Azeri frontline village – TV
ANS TV, Baku
17 May 04
[Presenter] The situation in the area of Agdam District of the
Armenian-Azerbaijani front is specially tense.
[Correspondent, over video of a board captioned as Xacincayi] Armenians
again stepped up their activities in the direction of Agdam on the
Armenian-Azerbaijani front on the night of 16-17 May. This time,
the enemy directed stream waters at the village of Tazakand in Agdam
District via a Friendship gas pipeline formerly laid in Yerevan. As
a result, houses of refugees settled in the area were flooded.
[Video shows a flooded house]
[Tahir Ibayev, refugee] This happened at about 0500 [0000 gmt] this
morning. The stream rushed into the house.
[Correspondent, over video] According to approximate calculations, the
gas pipeline is made up of pipes of about 730 millimetre in diameter
and one metre deep [underground]. According to local residents,
Armenians blew up the pipeline in 1994 and stopped exploiting
it. Specialists think that Armenians pump water from Xacincayi to
Tazakand through the pipeline and this is another provocation by
Armenia against the Azerbaijani people.
[Nizami Aliyev, deputy executive head of Agdam District, in his office]
[Sentence indistinct] Such a case has not occurred so far. For this
reason, we have not taken any preparatory measures beforehand to
prevent this.
[Correspondent, over video] The volume of water flowing through
the pipeline has reduced a little now and reached 2 cubic metres per
second. It is assumed that the enemy will suddenly increase the volume
of the pumped water at night. In this case, not only Tazakand, but
other villages nearby might be flooded. For this reason, the district
executive head is implementing urgent measures to avoid the imminent
disaster and change the course of water flowing through the pipeline.
Afat Telmanqizi, Sahin Rzayev, Zaur Naibov, ANS.