YEREVAN, Armenia (SONNA) \u2014 A fire at a military base in Armenia early Thursday killed 15 soldiers after they used gasoline for heating, the Defense Ministry said.<\/p>\n
The blaze quickly swept through a military barrack in the village of Azat, in Gegharkunik province, eastern Armenia.<\/p>\n
Authorities said that seven soldiers were injured, and three of them remained in grave condition.<\/p>\n
Armenian Defense Minister Suren Papikyan said at a Cabinet meeting that the fire erupted because soldiers used gasoline to fuel a stove in violation of fire safety rules. He said that the unit\u2019s commander and about a dozen other officers were also fired.<\/p>\n
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also fired Gen. Vagram Grigoryan, who was in charge of a group of forces in the region that includes the unit where the fire occurred.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors opened a probe into the fire.<\/p>\n
The Gegharkunik region borders Azerbaijan, which has been locked in a decades-long conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.<\/p>\n
In six weeks of heavy fighting that began in September 2020, the Azerbaijani military routed Armenian forces and moved deep into Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing Armenia to accept a Russia-brokered peace deal in November that year. Another flare-up of fighting last September killed 155 soldiers from both sides.<\/p>\n
Source: AP<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" YEREVAN, Armenia (SONNA) \u2014 A fire at a military base in Armenia early Thursday killed 15 soldiers after they used gasoline for heating, the Defense Ministry said. The blaze quickly swept through a military barrack in the village of Azat, in Gegharkunik province, eastern Armenia. Authorities said that seven soldiers were injured, and three of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":412338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-412337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412339,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412337\/revisions\/412339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}