Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said in a February 4 statement that Imran Mirzayev had been killed in a gunfight near the Azerbaijani-Armenian border on February 3.

According to the statement, three Armenian soldiers were also killed in the clash.

Baku and Yerevan have been locked in a conflict over Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh for over two decades. 

Armenia-backed separatists seized the region during a war in the early 1990s that killed some 30,000 people.

International diplomatic efforts to settle the conflict have brought little progress.