YEREVAN. – Idle talkers periodically attempt to meddle in the matters regarding the captives and missing persons as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict.

Armen Kaprielyan, head of the working group of Armenia’s Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons, told the aforesaid to Armenian News-NEWS.am. He noted this commenting on Turkish figure Göksel Gülbey’s respective publications in Azerbaijani media.

Kaprielyan, stressed that, by and large, such persons do not have the needed understanding of the topic about which they are making statements.

“Firs, the claim that we [the Armenian side to the conflict] have denied—for 25 consecutive years—the presence of Azerbaijani captives at us is absurd,” he said. “Gülbey should have studied the relevant archives and the materials published in the press to know exactly how many captives we have returned at different times. And if studying documents is complicated for Gülbey, he could have at least not become lazy and gotten acquainted with the [respective] 2016 data of the [relevant] Azerbaijani state commission.

“Second, doesn’t it seem extremely bizarre—to put it mildly—to us that the conflicting party that ‘holds representatives of the opposite party hostage’ and ‘still keeps them hungry and thirsty’ doesn’t create conditions for concealing the apparent violation of the norms of the Geneva law from the eyes of some citizens of Iran and Georgia?

“Third, (…) it’s not quite understandable on what basis is Gülbey going to submit his rhetoric to the prestigious international organizations he has mentioned. How can professionals assure this ‘figure’ that the given instances consider solely evidence-based materials?

“And fourth, let me remind Gülbey and people like him the essence of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, which arose as a result of Azerbaijan’s using military force to suppress the people’s expression of free will and for aggression against Artsakh. So, there can be no word about any ‘occupied territory of Azerbaijan.”’