Azerbaijanis are using gravestones for the construction of a road, Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) Foreign Minister David Babayan has said, Sputnik Armenia reports.

“They are building roads from Hadrut through [the village of] Karin Tak to Shushi. They are building a large road with a width of 40 meters," Babayan said. According to him, during construction Azerbaijanis destroy gravestones and use them to build the road.

The Karabakh foreign policy chief described the practice as vandalism,

Both during and after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in fall 2020, Azerbaijanis repeatedly committed acts of vandalism against Armenian cemeteries and cultural monuments.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.