Victim’s sister: “They killed an absolutely healthy man within 45 minutes.”
On 25 September, a resident of Gazakh in northwestern Azerbaijan, 37-year-old Elmir Mirza oghlu Akhundov, died at a local police station. According to his sister, Ulviyya Akhundova, he was beaten to death. Akhundova posted a series of photos showing her brother’s badly bruised body on Facebook.
The Azerbaijani Committee Against Torture
told Open.az
that, on the evening prior to his death, Akhundov had been in a fight with a member of a volunteer civilian law enforcement group called Public Police Support (
Polisə İctimai Dəstək
), in which Akhundov broke two of his opponent’s teeth. According to his sister, on the following day Akhundov was picked up by the police when he went out to buy cigarettes.
“As soon as I heard about it I went to the police department, but they wouldn’t let me in” Akhundova told Meydan TV. “A short time later an ambulance arrived. I asked what happened, but they wouldn’t tell me anything….They said somebody had had a brawl inside the police department and that was why the doctor had arrived. A short time later the hospital called to tell me that my brother had been beaten and killed and to ask me to come and take him away.”
According to Akhundova, her brother’s wrist, arm, hand, and leg were broken, and rocks were embedded in lacerations on his knees. She believes that her brother was beaten to death by the police, an accusation which the Gazakh district police department denies. Nevertheless, the Gazakh district prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal investigation into manslaughter and hooliganism.
