On May 5, the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared four Azerbaijani diplomats in Tehran and Tabriz persona non grata.

The Islamic Republic's Foreign Ministry explained that the expulsion of the neighboring country's diplomats was a retaliatory measure after the Azerbaijani authorities made a similar decision last month.

On the same day, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated that, as it is known, at the beginning of April of this year, four employees of the Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan were declared "persona-non-grata" (undesirable person) by the government of Azerbaijan due to activities that do not correspond to diplomatic status and contradict the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. 

"The Iranian side, in its turn, a few days after this step of Azerbaijan, without any reason and using the principle of reciprocity as an excuse, declared two employees of our country's Embassy in Iran and two employees of the Consulate General, who were evacuated in January, as undesirable persons. They were thrown against our country. This step harms the bilateral relations, which have several problems," the report added.

Notably, in recent years, there have been mutual accusations from both sides regarding the strained relations between Azerbaijan and Iran. On January 27 of this year, there was an armed raid on the embassy of Azerbaijan in Tehran. It was announced that one embassy employee was killed, and two were injured. After that, the employees of the embassy were evacuated from Iran. But the Azerbaijani consulate is operating there. After the armed attack on the embassy, the Iranian leadership announced that the incident would be investigated.