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Azerbaijani media ran false information stating that a high-ranking military officer of the Defence Ministry of the NKR was allegedly killed during an artillery attack on the posts of the Defence Army of the NKR. The Azerbaijani website Report.az circulates the news citing unnamed ‘Armenian media.’

Azerbaijani propaganda again once used the loophole on the Armenian website Mamul.am to circulate the false information. Mamul.am has a section called Spokesperson, where anyone can post news. The author of the fraud, a fake user Aleksan, who has no other article on the website, made immediately two mistakes. He wrote the phrase ‘Azerbaijani army’ with a capital letter, normally written with a small letter in Russian, while the name of the ‘defence army of the NKR’ appears in small letters in his text, actually giving away the authorship of the Azerbaijani side.

Artsrun Hovhannisyan, the spokesperson for the Defence Ministry of Armenia, wrote on his Facebook that the press-service of the Defence Ministry of the NKR will soon issue a statement to deny the false information. As for the video posted with the material, Hovhannisyan notes that ‘the Azerbaijani side actually confessed the fact of violating the ceasefire regime, and the military and political leadership of Azerbaijan will certainly be held responsible for that.’ He also added that the Azerbaijani side used the provocation to destabilise the situation on the eve of the important events in Armenia.

This is not the first case the Azerbaijani propaganda has used such methods to stuff false information. In August 2015, Azerbaijani news website Oxu.az cited its ‘anonymous reader’ to run false information about a ‘confirmation’ of the Armenian side’s losses during armed clashes, allegedly published on the website of the Armenian newspaper Aravot. The Azerbaijani website attached a faked screenshot of a Russian-language material with grammatical mistakes to its article.

In another case, the Azerbaijani hackers broke the website Tert.am and posted a fake press release of the Ministry of Defence of Armenia about numerous losses the Armenian side suffered on the border. However, the false information was quickly denied. Another text of similar content was posted on the Spokesperson section of Mamul.am, used also earlier by the Azerbaijani propaganda for running false information. Remarkably, the same Russian text was also published on the Armenian and English versions of the website.