YEREVAN. April 9 (Interfax) - No return of Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) from Azerbaijan was scheduled to take place on Thursday, April 8, commander of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh Rustam Muradov said.
"It's a misleading provocation. Ask them [Armenian authorities] about it. They're misleading the population. [The return of POWs] wasn't planned. It was just an ordinary working visit [to Baku]," Muradov told a correspondent from the Armenian newspaper Hraparak.
The newspaper has published a video of its journalist's conversation with Muradov at the parking lot of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Yerevan on its website.
Muradov also declined to say whether he is on his way to a meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
An airplane supposed to bring another group of Armenian POWs back home landed at Yerevan's Erebuni airport on Thursday evening. However, only Muradov was on board, with no Armenian POWs, Armenian media reported.
Information about the arrival of a group of Armenian POWs was confirmed to Armenian media outlets by Pashinyan's press secretary Mane Gevorkyan and the office of Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan.
Hraparak reported on Friday that a delegation of Azerbaijan and Turkey arrived in Yerevan together with Muradov to discuss issues concerning a transport corridor through the city of Meghri in southern Armenia that will connect Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.
The Armenian Defense Ministry, for its part, has denied the report about the Azerbaijani-Turkish delegation's arrival in Yerevan from Baku on board a Russian plane.
The parents of Armenian Armed Forces servicemen who went missing during the Karabakh war are continuing to block the entrances and exits of the Armenian Defense Ministry headquarters and have paralyzed traffic on the Gyumri-Yerevan and Gyumri-Vanadzor highways.
They have been blocking the Defense Ministry building since Thursday morning.
The parents are demanding information about the progress of the search operation and the state of their children.
The Armenian authorities have not disclosed the number of Armenian servicemen who went missing and were taken captive during the hostilities.