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Recently Azerbaijani site “Haqqin.az” published a letter in the name of "a Californian resident Aram Manudzhiyan." The letter contained the Azerbaijani interpretation of theses issued on "Manudzhiyan" website that were circulated by the Azerbaijani propaganda. Thus, the authors of the article argued that the U.S. Armenian had turned to the editorial of the Azerbaijani website to voice his dispositions on the Karabakh conflict. However, in the editorial office of haqqin.az, while writing the fake letter, they simply screwed up with the transcription of the Armenian family, which in the English version is written like “Manoogian” and is read as "Manukyan," and the name in some parts of the text is written as "Aram", while in other parts is "Ara".

The site, to which “Haqqin.az” reference to apparently for making its fake letter more convincing, really belongs to an Armenian citizen of the United States Ara Manoogian. However, he, surely, has not written such a letter to the editorial of the Russian-speaking Azerbaijani site.

Moreover, after learning about the forgery, Ara Manoogian accused the author of the libel and the editorial of the Haqqin.az of slandering and demanded to publish a refutation until 15 August 2014 and to apologize.

"In the article titled "The enemy of Sargsyan writes to Haqqin.az” Leo Maas claims that I, Ara Manoogian, have written a letter to the editorial of the Haqqin.az titled "Even the Armenian diaspora is outraged with the criminal regime of Karabakh." This is a blatant lie. There has been absolutely no contact between me and this news site or anyone associated with them before the publication of the mentioned article. On August 4, 2014, as soon as I learned about it, I sent a message on their Facebook page immediately, requested to send me a copy of the letter that I had allegedly sent them. I haven’t received any response from them till now," writes Ara Manoogian on his website.

Manoogian also suggests to check his remarks on his official website and to make sure that the Azerbaijani site has really distorted them.

This is not the first time that the Azerbaijani propaganda uses the method of "plaintive letters" on behalf of the Armenians, but usually they are fictional characters, and therefore such tricks have little effect on formation of public opinion. Apparently, that was the reason why they decided to use the name of a real character in the hope that he will not notice the fake or will ignore it, but they failed again.

Asatur Sargsyan