New-York Times journalist Seth Kugel has been included in the list of undesirable persons of the Azerbaijani foreign ministry for an illegal visit to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, spokesman for the Azerbaijani foreign ministry Hikmet Hajiyev told Trend.

“An article of the journalist, distorting the real situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, is disrespectful to the readers of the newspaper,” Hajiyev said. “It is also disrespectful to the rights of more than one million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons who have been subjected to the bloody ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories. It is regrettable that such an article appeared in New-York Times.”

Hajiyev was commenting on the journalist’s illegal visit to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

Hajiyev said that the facts of looting the property in the occupied territories belonging to Azerbaijani people, destruction of samples of material culture, Islamic monuments and shrines were not purposefully reflected in the article written by the order of the Armenian lobby.

“I would like to remind the management of New-York Times, which published this biased article about the “tourist” trips to the occupied territories, that such transnational crimes as human trafficking, production and sale of drugs, illicit arms trafficking, training of terrorists are committed in these territories,” he said.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The two countries signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia, France and the US are currently holding peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented the UN Security Council’s four resolutions on the liberation of the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding regions.