The LBCI crew sent to Nagorno-Karabakh to cover the ongoing clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces stayed hidden in an underground shelter for over 2 hours, after random Azerbaijani artillery fire reached them.
Reporter Edmond Sassine and cameraman Paul Bou Aoun were one of several international crews that have recently been operating in Nagorno-Karabakh, specifically in the village of Martuni.
While Sassine and Bou Aoun were touring the village, which had been targeted by Azerbaijani fire several times before, they were startled by a barrage of concentrated and unrelenting artillery fire near them.
Incidentally, LBCI’s cameraman was recording at the time when the shelling began, and the video showing the incident was shared by the news station on Thursday.
The 2-man crew, along with the other press teams that were with them, rushed into a nearby underground shelter for protection.
“There was a state of terror and panic because the site we were at was being highly targeted and shells were landing consecutively,” Sassine recounted.
The reporter said that the random shelling reached the civilian population in the village, and the evacuation of a member of an Armenian crew who got wounded was impossible for a long period due to the prolonged and heavy shelling.
They remained in the shelter for 2 and a half hours before they could rush outside and escape the “monstrous” shelling of the village while Azerbaijani drones hovered overhead as the crew drove away to safety.
The incident comes days into the ongoing clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is seeing combat at an unprecedented scale since the ceasefire between the two countries in the 1990s.
The video below contains the footage caught by Paul Bou Aoun in Nagorno-Karabakh (starts at 1:19).