TORTURE AND REPRESSIONS IN APRIL 2020
21 April
A religious activist has complained about torture in the Azerbaijani police
Logo of the Muslim Unity Movement
The police tortured Hikmat Agayev, an activist of the “Muslim Unity” Movement who had been arrested under an administrative procedure, said Arzu Abdulla, a member of the Public Committee for the Protection of Rights of the Arrested Islamists.
According to Arzu Abdulla, Hikmat Agayev was detained when he was delivering food for the needy families on 10 April,
“Hikmat Agayev is a representative of a small business. He has a small grocery shop. At his own expense, he made food packages for the poor families and personally delivered food aid due to the quarantine regime. Because of social isolation, many were left unemployed and Hikmat Agayev decided to support these people. On 10 April, he was stopped on his way to a village on the outskirts of Baku by the traffic patrol while he was delivering the food. Agayev tried to explain to the officers where and why he was going to. However, the police officers were relentless. And then, right on the spot where he was stopped Hikmat Agayev started live streaming live on Facebook.”
H.Agayev’s video shows his car full of the grocery bags. He says that the police prevented him from delivering aid to the poor and issued a fine of 100 manats ($60).
Agayev also showed the ticket. The video was posted by Arzu Abdullah on her Facebook page on 10 April. And she further added that the next day, 11 April, Hikmat Agayev, while making another batch of aid, was grabbed from his shop and taken to one of the police stations.
- Abdulla wrote,
“The next day Agayev was arrested and sentenced to 25 days detention by the court order, since he was found guilty of violating the quarantine regime and disobeying the police. For almost a week there was no communication with him. Finally, on Friday, April 17, he managed to send a note to his family. He wrote that he had been brutally beaten by the policemen and that they had broken his finger and damaged his ear. He also informed his family that he had written a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office with a complaint about the torture and a request to punish the perpetrators. As it turned out, the police had questioned Agayev about the reasons behind providing aid to the poor and about those who were funding it. He was beaten until he lost his consciousness”.
The human rights activist also specified that the police thereafter began threatening to target Agayev’s family members,
“Only then he provided the password to access his mobile phone, and the officers read his Facebook correspondence, deleted the video on which he had criticized the traffic cops”.
Javad Javadov, Hikmat Agayev’s lawyer, confirmed that he had managed to meet with his client only on 17 April. Just then the lawyer found out that H. Agayev had been arrested under the Articles 211 (Violation of quarantine) and 535.1 (Failure to obey the police) of the Administrative Offences Code of Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani human rights activists condemned the arrest and torture of Hikmat Agayev as ” Ilham Aliyev’s policy using the pandemic against his political opponents” and urged him to “stop his anti-constitutional actions”.