The Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS) is shocked by yet another assassination attempt on blogger Mahammad Mirzali living in political exile and praises the law enforcement agencies of France for the successful operation to prevent this insidious crime in their territory.
Two alleged assassins were detained on June 14, 2022, in France. A gun was found in a car with Polish license plates they were driving. The address of the blogger in the city of Nantes was entered into the suspects’ GPS navigator, and Mirzali’s photographs were also found on their phones.
There have been already two assassination attempts against blogger Mirzali. One in 2020, when four shots were fired at the blogger. The assassin missed, so the blogger was only slightly wounded in the shoulder, bullets mainly hitting his car. Another attempt was made in 2021 using knives. The attackers inflicted 16 stab wounds on the blogger and tried to cut out his tongue.
The IRFS believes that the customers of all three assassination attempts are high-ranking representatives of Azerbaijan’s ruling elite, who consider themselves offended by the blogger’s public statements on his YouTube and Facebook pages, which he ironically named “Made in Azerbaijan” (the total number subscribers is about 500 thousand people).
The IRFS is seriously concerned about the surge in illegal extraterritorial repression organized by Azerbaijan’s ruling elite against its critics living in political exile in Europe. Quite recently, in April of 2022, blogger Manaf Jalilzadeh, who lives in Switzerland, was brutally attacked. Some unknown persons of Azerbaijani origin (they were voicing threats and demands in Azerbaijani) subjected the blogger to severe beating and demanded from him to stop criticizing the government. They also demanded a public apology on camera, concurrently promising that in case of the blogger not stopping his activities he would be killed next time.
Over the past two weeks in Germany, unknown people have established surveillance of bloggers Tural Sadigli and Orkhan Aghayev, in connection with which the latter turned to law enforcement agencies. Since the beginning of the year, both bloggers have also received numerous threats of physical violence. Earlier, bloggers Rafael Piriyev and Gabil Mammadov, who were also sharply criticizing the Azerbaijani authorities, were attacked in Germany.
In recent years, extraterritorial illegal punitive measures against critics of the Azerbaijani government have been carried out in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, and Russia.
The IRFS calls on the authorities of these countries to conduct a thorough and effective investigation of all cases of crimes against bloggers in exile and provide them with effective protection from the illegal politically motivated repressive and punitive persecution by the Azerbaijani authorities.
The IRFS calls on the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic, General Rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on Freedom of the Media and Safety of Journalists Mogens Jensen, as well as co-rapporteurs of the PACE Monitoring Committee Stefan Schennach and Ian Liddell-Grainger to urge the Azerbaijani government to stop the illegal extraterritorial repressive and punitive persecution of all its critics, both in exile and those continuing their work in Azerbaijan.
Source: IRFS