Askeran, on the road between Stepanakert and Aghdam. It degenerated into a skirmish. These clashes left about 50 Armenians wounded, and a local policeman, according to information from International Historical-enlightenment Human rights Society – Memorial, an Azeri, shot and killed two Azerbaijanis – Bakhtiyar Guliyev, 16, and Ali Hajiyev, 23. On February 27, 1988, while speaking on Central TV, the USSR Deputy Prosecutor General A. Katusev mentioned the nationality of those killed. Within hours, a pogrom against Armenian residents began in the city of Sumgait, 25 km north of Baku, where many Azerbaijani refugees resided. The pogrom lasted for three days. The exact mortality is disputed. The official investigation reported 32 deaths – six Azerbaijanis and 26 Armenians, while the US Library of Congress put the number of Armenian victims at over 100. A similar attack on Azerbaijanis occurred in the Armenian towns of Spitak, and Gugark, during the Gugark pogrom and others. Azerbaijani sources put the number of Azerbaijanis killed in clashes in Armenia at 216 total, including 57 women, five infants and 18 children of different ages. The KGB of Armenia, however, said that it had tracked the people from the Azerbaijani list-of-dead and that the majority of them had previously died, were living in other regions of the USSR, or died in the earthquake of 1988 in Spitak; the Armenian KGB said 25 had been killed – an initially unchallenged figure. Large numbers of refugees left Armenia and Azerbaijan as pogroms began against the minority populations of the each of the two countries. In the fall of 1989, intensified inter-ethnic conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh led Moscow to grant Azerbaijani authorities greater leeway in controlling that region. The Soviet policy backfired, however, when a joint session of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the National Council, the legislative body of Nagorno-Karabakh, proclaimed the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. In mid-January 1990, Azerbaijani protesters in Baku went on a rampage against the remaining Armenians there. Moscow intervened only after almost no Armenian population remained in Baku. It sent army troops, who violently suppressed the Azerbaijan Popular Front (APF) and installed Ayaz Mutallibov as president. The troops reportedly killed 122 Azerbaijanis in quelling the uprisining, in what became known as Black January, and Gorbachev denounced the APF for striving to establish an Islamic Republic. In a December 1991 referendum, boycotted by most of the local