The Presidency Press Office issued the following statement responding to Asas Media, which has repeatedly insulted the position of the Presidency of the Republic and the person of President Aoun.

The statement said: ““Al-Assas Media website published an article signed by editor-in-chief, Ziad Itani, in which he conveyed a statement attributed to the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, which was previously attributed to Al-Jumhuriya newspaper in its issue of May 20, 2011 on the basis that it was mentioned in “WikiLeaks” documents, quoting former Justice Minister Charles Rizk, during a meeting that he included with the former US ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman in 2007, in which he addressed a statement attributed to President Aoun about the honorable Sunni community.”

The Presidency Press Office is interested in emphasizing that the speech attributed to the President of the Republic is entirely fabricated and has never been issued at any time, nor is it part of his manners. What was published in the year 2011 was the object of denial on May 21 2011, in addition to a lawsuit filed on May 26, 2011 against Minister Rizk, the publisher of the newspaper and its responsible director for “the offense of publishing false news, inciting murder, and attempting to incite sectarian strife”.

Noting that the former minister Rizk denied at the time to the newspaper that published “record”, in which he said: “I have no knowledge of all these lies, and only fools care about” WikiLeaks “and its lies”.

It is regrettable that the “Asas Media” website resorts to re-circulating these lies and building upon them in an article that includes a set of additional fabrications and lies with well-known aims, especially since the aforementioned website has been persistent for some time to offend the presidency of the republic and the person of President Aoun, by publishing articles promoting data from the imagination of the website’s writers”.