Not enough data to claim that the Mingachevir missile photo is staged<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
On October 4, Azerbaijan claimed that Armenia had attacked one of the country\u2019s most important civilian infrastructure, Mingachevir. The site is both a hydropower plant and an electric plant. Azerbaijan accused<\/a> Armenia of hitting the electric plant with Tochka-U missiles. The Armenian MoD denied <\/a>this.<\/p>\n Soon, President Aliyev\u2019s foreign affairs aide Hikmet Hajiyev published photos as proof of the attack. But the photos showed an unexploded Smerch missile instead of a Tochka-U, as it was claimed initially.<\/p>\n Only one pair of photos published by Hajiyev showed<\/a> the surrounding landscape. Armenian social media users widely regarded<\/a> the photos fake.<\/p>\n Some analysts indeed claimed<\/a> that the photo might be staged because of certain inconsistencies: a wooden stick supporting the missile is seen; the missile is right in front of a door with a brand new-looking sign \u201cEnerji bloklari\u201d (\u201cPower blocks\u201d); the asphalt around the missile is almost not cracked. <\/p>\n While not all of these claims can be verified, videos<\/a> and photos<\/a> from the ground published later show no wooden stick supporting the missile: it is likely a piece of metal . Therefore, there is not enough data to support the claim about the visuals being staged.<\/p>\n A 2018 video from Gaza spreads as evidence of an attack on Mingachevir<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Soon after the announcement by Azerbaijan, a video<\/a> started circulating on social media with claims that it shows the Azerbaijan air defense system hitting an Armenian Tochka-U near Mingachevir.<\/p>\n The video, however, is not new: it is from the 2018 attack in Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n Possibility of an attack on Mingachevir was a subject of speculation before<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On July 16, during a clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan announced<\/a> that their \u201cadvanced missile systems are able to precisely hit the Metsamor nuclear power plant\u201d in Armenia.<\/p>\n According to the Azerbaijani side, this threat was a response to the statements made in Armenia about threats to damage the Mingachevir hydroelectric power plant. But no official source in Armenia has made such a statement.<\/p>\n Instead, such a claim was made two weeks earlier by Vagharshak Harutyunyan, who led the Armenian Ministry of Defense for one year in 1999-2000. The former official said<\/a> that Armenians have weapons that can hit Mingachevir. His claim was based on a secret report of a Russian general made in the 1990s. Media.am failed to confirm the existence of that report.<\/p>\n After the armed clash stopped, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made Vagharshak Harutyunyan his advisor.<\/p>\n Fake visuals of airport attack circulate on Armenian social media<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fake visuals also circulate on Armenian social media. After Armenia announced it hit a military base in Azerbaijan\u2019s second-largest city, Ganja, a misleading photo of an airport was posted by journalist Artak Aleksanyan. \u201cGanja\u2019s airport was destroyed,\u201d Aleksanyan wrote<\/a>, sharing a picture of Lankaran airport. Lankaran is nearly 400 km away from Ganja.<\/p>\n Karine Ghazaryan<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the first official photos of what Azerbaijan claimed as being an unexploded missile in Mingachevir came, Armenian social media widely regarded them fake. There were, indeed, fake visuals being spread after the attack on the Ganja city military base and the alleged attack on Mingachevir HPP. But in the case of evidence from official Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-verified","author_posts-karine-ghazaryan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24472"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24501,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472\/revisions\/24501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/media.am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Photo-missle.jpg\")
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