He was the author and editor of numerous monographs, books, and articles on the history of Caucasus. Soviet orientalist and journalist Farid Seyful-Mulukov noted regarding Bunyadov's translation of the Quran: "He was an outstanding scholar. Quran translation requires excellent knowledge of the Arabic language and few dare to embark upon that job. Ziya Bunyadov managed to do excellent translation of the Holy Book." Death On 21 February 1997 Bunyadov was murdered at the entrance to his apartment in Baku. Though the official state investigation placed the responsibility on a group of Islamic extremists, many of whom received life sentences, the culprits and circumstances of Bunyadov's murder remained mysterious. According to John W. Parker, chief of the Division for Caucasus and Central Asia within the U.S. State Department, Bunyadov's murderers were trained in Iran. He was buried at the Alley of Honor. Critics Bunyadov researched ancient and medieval Azerbaijani historiography, specializing in Caucasian Albania and Azerbaijan during the Arab caliphate rule, concentrating on events from the 7th19th centuries AD. In different areas, Bunyadov's work has met severe criticism. According to journalist Thomas de Waal: "Buniatov's academy reissued thirty thousand copies of a forgotten racist tract by the turn of the century Russian polemicist Vasil Velichko; later Buniatov began a poisonous quarrel for which Caucasian Albanians themselves should take none of them blame. Buniatov’s scholarly credentials were dubious. It later transpired that the two articles he published in 1960 and 1965 on Caucasian Albania were direct plagiarism. Under his own name, he had simply published, unattributed, translations of two articles, originally written in English by Western scholars C.F.J. Dowsett and Robert Hewsen." Bunyadov is also known for his article, "Why Sumgait?", on the 1988 ethnic riots in the town of Sumgait. Thomas de Waal calls Bunyadov "Azerbaijan’s foremost Armenophobe," and says, "Buniatov concluded that the Sumgait pogroms had been planned by the Armenians themselves in order to discredit Azerbaijan and boost the Armenian nationalist cause." (see Sumgait pogrom#Conspiracy theories). According to Russian historian Victor Schnirelmann, Bunyadov "purposefully tried 'to clear' the territories of modern Azerbaijan from the presence of Armenian history". "Another way is to underestimate the presence of Armenians in ancient and medieval Transcaucasia and to belittle their role by reprinting antique and medieval sources with denominations and replacements of the 'Armenian state' term to 'the Albanian state' or with other distortions of original texts. In the 1960s to 1990s there