Several days after a security guard was killed and two others were wounded in an armed attack on Baku’s embassy in Tehran, Baku urged on Tuesday its citizens against unnecessary travel to Iran.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a statement published on its website that the citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan are advised not to visit the Islamic Republic of Iran unless necessary due to the terrorist attack against Azerbaijan’s diplomatic mission and the unstable situation in Iran.
The ministry added that people who decided to visit Iran regardless are advised to exercise increased caution.
The Azeri foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador to Baku after the attack to demand justice despite the prompt reaction of the Tehran police and the fact that Iran’s officials have condemned Friday’s incident.
Previously on Sunday evening, Azerbaijan evacuated 53 of its embassy staff and family members from Iran along with the body of Orkhan Askerov, the chief of the embassy security staff who was killed in the attack.
Azerbaijan media portrayed the incident as a terror attack and some media outlets even claimed that the assailant Yasin Hosseinzadeh was related to Iran’s special services and a member of IRGC.
While briefing them on the preliminary investigation, Tehran’s police chief Hossein Rahimi told reporters that the attack was apparently motivated by personal and family-related problems and not by a political motive.
Azeri media also claimed that Iranian security forces guarding the Azerbaijan Embassy did not try to stop the attack whereas Azerbaijani foreign ministry spokesman Ayxan Hacizada blamed the attack on the recent anti-Azerbaijani campaign in Iranian media.
Sharing a border of around 700 kilometers, Iran and Azerbaijan have a complex relationship due to Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel- a major supplier of arms to Baku – that Tehran is wary of as well as the nationalists in Azerbaijan and Turkey, its close ally, which are fanning separatist tendencies among Iran’s sizeable ethnic Azeri population.
