Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry confirms four Azerbaijani diplomats declared personae non gratae in Iran

BAKU. May 5 (Interfax) - Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry confirmed on Friday that Iran had declared four Azerbaijani diplomats personae non gratae.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada said that Azerbaijan's government declared four officials of the Iranian embassy in Baku personae non gratae in early April because their activities were incompatible with their diplomatic status and were at odds with the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

"A few days after this move by Azerbaijan, the Iranian side, in turn, designated two employees of our country's embassy in Iran who were previously evacuated in January, and two employees of the Consulate General in Tabriz, as undesirable, without any [justifiable] grounds for this and only citing the principle of reciprocity," Hajizada said.

"This step taken [by Iran] against our country is detrimental to [our] bilateral relations, which already suffer from a number of problems," he said.