BBC Monitoring Service, ANS TV ,
20, January 2008

Azerbaijan observed a minute of silence on 20 January as over a million people attended a ceremony in the capital Baku to pay tribute to those killed by Soviet troops 18 years ago, ANS reported.

At 1200 local time, ships in the Bay of Baku and vehicles in the city sounded their horns to commemorate the victims.

President Ilham Aliyev and other senior government officials visited the Alley of Martyrs to pay respects to the dead.

Nearly 130 civilians were killed and hundreds were wounded after Soviet troops invaded the city to put down angry protests triggered by what Baku residents believed was Moscow's support for Armenian claims to Azerbaijan's Nagornyy Karabakh region.

The conflict still remains unresolved as international efforts to find a peaceful settlement to the dispute have yielded no tangible results.

Azerbaijan declared its independence from the former Soviet Union a year after the killings.