Armenian armed forces and mercenary units spared virtually none of those who had been unable to flee Khojaly and the surrounding area. In the words of the journalist Chingiz Mustafaev, among the dead were "... dozens upon dozens of children between 2 and 15 years old. women and old people, in most cases shot at point-blank range in the head. The position of the bodies indicated that the people had been killed in cold blood, calculatedly. without any sign of a struggle or of having tried to escape. Some had been taken aside and shot singly; many had been killed as whole families at once. Some corpses displayed several wounds, one of which was invariably in the head, suggesting that the wounded had been finished off. Some children were found with severed ears; the skin had been cut from the left side of an elderly woman's face; and men had been scalped. There were corpses that had clearly been robbed. The first time we arrived at the scene of the shootings of 28 February, accompanied by two military helicopters, we saw from the air an open area about one kilometre across which was strewn with corpses almost everywhere..." (Khojaly-The Last Day, Baku, Azerbaijan publishing house, 1992).

An inhabitant of Khojaly, Djanan Orudjev, also provided information on the many victims, chiefly women and children. His 16-year-old son. was shot, and his 23-year-old daughter with her twin children and another, 18-year-old daughter who was pregnant, were taken hostage. Saria Talybova, who witnessed the bloody tragedy as it unfolded, watched as four Meskhetian Turks, refugees from Central Asia, and three Azerbaijanis were beheaded on the grave of an Armenian soldier, and children were tortured and killed before their parents' eyes; two Azerbaijanis in national army uniform had their eyes put out with screwdrivers. The organized nature of the extermination.of the people of Khojaly was further evident from the fact that the peaceful inhabitants who fled the town in desperation to save their lives were killed outside it in previously prepared ambushes. For example, Elman Mamedov, chief of administration in Khojaly, reported that a large group of people who had left Khojaly came under heavy fire from Armenian light and heavy machine-guns and armoured personnel carriers near the village of Nakhichevanik. Another resident of Khojaly, Sanubar Alekperova, said she would never forget the mountains of corpses of women, children and old people near Nakhichevanik, where they fell into an ambush: in the carnage, her mother and her two daughters, Sevinzh and Khidzhran. were killed and she herself was wounded. Faced with this mass shooting-down of unarmed people, some of the group made for the village of Gyulably. but there the Armenians took some 200 people hostage. Among them was Dzhamil Mamedov; the Armenians tore out his nails," beat him about the legs and head and took away his grandson, and his wife and daughter vanished without trace. (Khojaly-The Last Day, op, cıt.).

"I had heard a lot about wars, about the cruelty of the Fascists, but the Armenians were worse, killing five- and six-year-old children, killing innocent civilians”, said a French journalist, Jean-Yves Junet, who visited