Opposition leader Vazgen Manukian flatly denied on Monday a disparaging newspaper report that quoted him as justifying more than a decade ago any method of political struggle, including violence and blackmail, against then President Levon Ter-Petrosian.

[…]

The newspaper allegations are certain to rekindle the long-running feud between the two most important leaders of the 1988 movement for Nagorno-Karabakh’s unification with Armenia who jointly headed the former Soviet republic’s first post-Communist government. They will also almost certainly preclude any cooperation between them in the upcoming presidential election.

http://armenialiberty.org/armeniareport/report/en/2007/12/91950C00-4205-4582-8241-9F7B8AD145FA.asp

Police in Yerevan interrogated on Thursday the editor of a leading opposition newspaper as part of a criminal investigation into its article that accused opposition leader Vazgen Manukian of justifying any method of political struggle against former President Levon Ter-Petrosian.

The pro-Ter-Petrosian daily “Haykakan Zhamanak” published on December 15 excerpts from what it presented as Manukian’s private notes confiscated by security forces during the 1996 government crackdown on his National Democratic Union (AZhM) and other major opposition groups. The paper said they were written in the months leading up to the disputed September 1996 election official results of which showed the then incumbent Ter-Petrosian narrowly defeating Manukian. The latter challenged the disputed vote results with street protests that turned violent and were quelled by troops and the police.

[…]

Manukian promptly rejected the embarrassing allegations as a fabrication and demanded an official forensic examination which he says would prove that the handwriting of the notes is not his. He asked the Office of the Prosecutor-General to bring a defamation case against “Haykakan Zhamanak” after its editor, Nikol Pashinian, refused to give him a copy of the notes.

The prosecutors granted the request on December 20, instructing the police department of Yerevan’s central administrative district to conduct the criminal inquiry. Investigators are expected to only establish who wrote the notes but also clarify how the paper got hold a document that was supposed kept by law-enforcement authorities.

http://armenialiberty.org/armeniareport/report/en/2007/12/D40B0265-8E7F-42E1-9EDD-33B6B1CC2917.asp

This is not the first time that Pashinyan has been found guilty of slander, and quite frankly, the media is better off without such yellow journalism, all political ideology aside.