Anatol Lieven wrote in
The Times after visiting the site of the massacre: "Scattered amid the withered grass and bushes along a small valley and across the hillside beyond are the bodies of last Wednesday’s massacre by Armenian forces of Azerbaijani refugees. ... Of the 31 we saw, only one policeman and two apparent national volunteers were wearing a uniform. All the rest were civilians, including eight women and three small children. Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women’s arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground." Helen Womack reported in
The Independent: "The exact number of victims is still unclear, but there can be little doubt that Azeri civilians were massacred by Armenian fighters in the snowy mountains of Nagorny Karabakh last week. Refugees from the enclave town of Khojaly, sheltering in the Azeri border town of Agdam, give largely consistent accounts of how their enemies attacked their homes on the night of 25 February, chased those who fled and shot them in the surrounding forests. Yesterday I saw 75 freshly dug graves in one cemetery in addition to four mutilated corpses we were shown in the mosque when we arrived in Agdam late on Tuesday. I also saw women and children with bullet wounds, in a makeshift hospital in a string of railway carriages at the station", "I have little doubt that on this occasion, two weeks ago, the Azeris were the victims of Armenian brutality. In the past, it has been the other way round" Russian journalist
Victoria Ivleva entered Khojaly after it fell to Armenian armed forces. She took photos of the town streets strewn with dead bodies of its inhabitants, including women and children. She described how she saw a large crowd of
Meskhetian Turks from Khojaly who were led to captivity by the Armenian militants and she was hit by an Armenian soldier who took her for one of the captives, when she was helping a woman falling behind the crowd with four children, one of which wounded, and the other one newly born. The captives were later exchanged or released, and in 2011 Ivleva found that woman in Azerbaijan. Her little child grew up, but did not speak, this was attributed to the shock she suffered in childhood. After the seizure of Khojaly, Armenians allowed Azerbaijanis to claim their dead, based on which the Azerbaijanis later grounded their accusations of the massacre. As argued by British historian
Christopher J. Walker, the group committing a massacre would have hardly taken up any of these measures. Czech journalist Dana Mazalova said that in Baku she had seen
Chingiz Mustafayev's unedited footage of the dead bodies without the signs of mutilation that were shown in later footage.
Eynulla Fatullayev and "Karabakh Diary" Azerbaijani journalist
Eynulla Fatullayev traveled in 2005 to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and wrote an article called "Karabakh Diary". He claimed that he met some refugees from Khojaly, temporarily settled in Naftalan, who said that the Armenians had indeed left a free corridor and the Armenian soldiers positioned behind the corridor had not opened fire on them. Some soldiers from the battalions of the National Front of Azerbaijan instead, for some reason, had led part of the refugees in the direction of the village of Nakhichevanik, which during that period had been under the control of the Armenians' Askeran battalion. The other group of refugees were hit by artillery volleys while they were reaching the Agdam Region. However, in his statement to the
European Court of Human Rights Fatullayev claimed that in the article "The Karabakh Diary", he had merely conveyed the statements of a local Armenian, who had told Fatullayev his version of the events during the interview. Fatullayev claimed that his article did not directly accuse any Azerbaijani national of committing any crime and that in his article, there was no statement asserting that any of the Khojaly victims had been killed or mutilated by Azerbaijani fighters. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Fatullayev must be released, because in their opinion "although “The Karabakh Diary” might have contained certain exaggerated or provocative assertions, the author did not cross the limits of journalistic freedom". The Court, however, also noted that "The Karabakh Diary" did not constitute a piece of
investigative journalism focusing specifically on the Khojaly events and considered that Fatullayev's statements about these events were made rather in passing, parallel to the main theme of the article. Memorial called for an investigation of the facts of participation of CIS soldiers in the military operations in the region and transfer of military equipment to the sides of the conflict. Soon after the massacre, in early March 1992, the regiment was withdrawn from Nagorno-Karabakh.
Paratroopers evacuated the personnel of the regiment by helicopter, but over 100 soldiers and officers remained in Stepanakert and joined the Armenian forces, including the commander of the 2nd battalion major
Seyran Ohanyan, who later served as a
Minister of Defense of Armenia. The
Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper reported: == Armenian reactions ==