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Footage of a captured Armenian soldier shown on Azerbaijani has provoked fury in his Armenia, where the feeling is that he was coerced into giving a TV interview, Idrak Abbasov and Vahe Harutyunyan write in site of Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

Armenian officials say Private Hakob Injighulyan, 22, got lost and strayed over the border into Azerbaijan on the night of August 7-8. Deputy foreign minister Shavarsh Khocharyan told reporters that the soldier crossed the front line by accident because his sight was poor. He also noted that the Azerbaijani side deliberately was delaying access to the prisoner when this was requested by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“It’s now clear why Azerbaijani officials didn’t grant permission for ICRC representatives to see the Armenian prisoner. They were preparing him for the interview,” he said. “Azerbaijan is clearly trying to cause problems for Injighulyan in his home country, although the Armenian authorities have already announced that he will not be subjected to a legal investigation when he comes home.”

According to the material ICRC staff eventually got to see Injighulyan on August 20, and passed a letter from the soldier to his family, in which he wrote that he was being well treated.

That did little to reassure the likes of Larisa Alaverdyan, a well-known human rights activist, who wrote an open letter accusing Azerbaijan of breaching the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners-of-war.

“If Armenia and Azerbaijan are not at war, they are not at peace, either. An uneasy truce has been in place since 1994, when an end to open hostilities in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict was negotiated. Since then, Karabakh has had its own Armenian administration while Azerbaijan continues to press its claim to reclaim the area,” the material says.

Armen Badalyan, an analyst with the Centre for Political Studies in Yerevan, recalled the case of Manvel Saribekyan, an Armenian captured inside Azerbaijan in 2010. Who according to authorities in Baku later had committed suicide. Azerbaijani officials accused him of being on a sabotage mission. The Armenian authorities said Saribekyan was a local shepherd whose only mission was to find some stray animals. When his body was returned to Yerevan, prosecutors said it showed signs of beatings.

Yashar Jafarli, a retired lieutenant-colonel in the Azerbaijan army, argued that the interview with Injighulyan had been shown for domestic consumption in Azerbaijan, to counter public anger into the frequent death of conscripts. The idea, he said, was to show people that the Armenian army was even worse.

“You mustn’t forget what kind of pressure these young men are under when they speak,” he added. “Both Azerbaijan and Armenia are taking part in this information war,” Jafarli noted.

The authors of the article note that, the head of Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, wrote to the official leader of Azerbaijan’s Muslim majority, Allahshukur Pashazade, asking him to intervene on Injighulyan’s behalf. Pashazade has yet to respond.

Earlier MoD NKR reported that on the night of August 8th, at about 03.00, the citizen of the Republic of Armenia Hakob Gevorg Injighulyan, born in 1991, had lost his bearings on the terrain and inadvertently crossed the Line of Contact. He was subsequently found in the area of protection of Azerbaijani troops and captured by the latter.