Employees of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) met with participants in a rally held in front of the NSS building on Tuesday in support of arrested former senior parliament staffer Ara Saghatelyan and asked them to hand over the books placed in front of the entrance of the building to the NSS reception.

One of the participants, political scientist Armen Minasyan, told reporters that the protest action was successful in some sense.

“You all know who Ara Saghatelyan is. Those gathered here are members of a team that took efforts to counteract the Azerbaijani propaganda, and led by Saghatelyan, carried out a great deal of work. It might sound kind of immodest, but I can say that we are talking about a person who won the information war against Azerbaijan before, during and after the April 2016 war,” said Armen Minasyan, who is an author and co-author of films exposing Azerbaijani lies.

Minasyan stressed that the rally is aimed to show that Ara Saghatelyan is the last person to be accused of negatively influencing the war. He considers it absurd that Saghatelyan is being accused of Armenia’s defeat in the recent Artsakh war. 

“Some act which has had a negative impact on the recent war is ascribed to him. The absurdity has reached the point where after assessing the outcomes of the war, the authorities decided that Ara Saghatelyan was to blame for the defeat. As if it was he who ordered the transfer of servicemen to frontlines by trucks, with the latter being killed in Bayraktar drone attacks halfway. We have ended up in this situation. Today a man has been arrested who, by his very nature and biography, cannot be accused of what he is being accused of,” he said.

Armen Minasyan, who was the deputy head of the Public Relations and Information Center SNCO during Saghatelyan's tenure, noted that in those years a large analytical base was created, valuable books were published, films and websites were created that exposed the lies of the Azerbaijani propaganda. The materials collected and published by the center were used by the Foreign Ministry.

“They were also used by the current authorities, but this is what we got,” he said.