Azerbaijan defense ministry said a man from Azeri Chemenli village had been killed, eight residents wounded and 50 houses destroyed by the shelling.

A Moscow-brokered ceasefire halted four days of violence in the South Caucasus region on April 5, but sporadic shooting is still frequent at night.

On Tuesday (April 26) the Armenian-backed breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh said two of its soldiers were killed by gunfire from Azerbaijan.

The mountainous enclave lays within Azerbaijan's borders, but is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians who reject Azerbaijan's rule.

With support from Armenia they fought a war in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union crumbled to establish de facto control over the territory.

The fighting this month was the most intense since a 1994 ceasefire that stopped the conflict but did not resolve the underlying dispute, Reuters reported.

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