First Nagorno-Karabakh War
Six days after the Regional Soviet decided to allow Nagorno-Karabakh to leave the Azerbaijan SSR, a group of forty or fifty people who were mobilized by some of the Azerbaijani refugees protested in the Lenin Square in Sumgait. The next day the demonstration culminated in several hundred people and in the evening, incidents of violence were confirmed. The local police consisted of a huge majority of Azerbaijanis and it did not function at all when violence occurred. Furthermore, in the same evening, Alexander Katusev, who was the military prosecutor of the USSR in Azerbaijan, revealed on national TV broadcast and on Baku Radio that the two Azerbaijanis were killed in Askeran five days before, which angered the crowd.