It’s been more than two weeks since Leyla Mustafayeva saw her husband, a well-known Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Mukhtarli.
Mukhtarli, 43, went missing on May 29 in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where the family has been living for two years, only to be found the next day in a jail in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijani authorities claim that Mukhtarli tried to illegally cross the border into the country while carrying 10,000 euros and confronted the law enforcers as they arrested him.
But Mukhtarli says that he was abducted in Tbilisi and taken into Azerbaijan with a sack on his head.
His family and colleagues believe that it was an attempt by Azerbaijani authorities to silence the journalist who is famous for his investigations of the businesses of the family of the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and government corruption.
There are some indications that the authorities of Georgia and Azerbaijan might have cooperated in the abduction of Azeri reporter. The first public assertion of this came on June 9 from Azerbaijani parliamentarian Elman Nasirov, a member of the ruling party, who said that special services forces worked together to seize Mukhtarli and deliver him to Azerbaijan. His version of events was later refuted by both Georgian and Azeri security agencies.
However, June 14 report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner, points out to some evidence that might suggest some involvement of Georgian authorities, or at least the unwillingness of Georgian police to investigate the case.
According to OCCRP investigation, two of its reporters and a Rustavi-2 TV journalist viewed two hours of video from a camera at a private business on the route Mukhtarli said he took. Georgian security officials visited this business before and shortly after the journalists were there. The name of the business is being withheld at its request.
The video appears to be doctored. It shows a view of a busy sidewalk on Nikoloz Baratashvili Street, one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Tbilisi, during the early evening.
At first, the video shows a street scene that is dark and rainy. At about the time Mukhtarli would be passing by, there is an abrupt break in the footage, and the next shots show a clear early evening with the sun shining. The vehicles and pedestrians visible before and after the break do not match. The clock on the video shows a leap backwards in time of several seconds. A few minutes later, the video appears to revert to the rainy evening.
The reporters interviewed more than a dozen people who were in the area of Mukhtarli’s kidnapping at the time. Nobody said they saw anything. Two shop employees who did not want themselves or their shops identified said that official Ministry of Internal Affairs cameras are mounted on their shop, but access to the footage can only be obtained from inside the shop.
The two employees, interviewed nine days after the incident, said no security operatives had yet entered their shop to check the video, which would likely have a clear image of the blue Opel van driving Mukhtarli after the abduction. Other people interviewed said police did not question them until eight days after the incident.
It wouldn’t be the first time Azerbaijani government targeted journalists that are critical towards the Aliyevs.
In 2014, it imprisoned journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who reported on the first family’s wealth. Ismayilova was sentenced to 7.5 years but released on appeal in 2016 after international organizations and the West intervened and put pressure on Azerbaijan.
The government also forced Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that published Ismayilova’s stories, to shut down their office in Baku in 2015. A year later, the government closed down an independent TV station that planned to air an interview with Turkish cleric and critic of Turkish government Fethullah Gulen.
But Mukhtarli’s case is the first time that Azerbaijani went this far, allegedly abducting the journalist on a foreign soil.
Mukhtarli was arrested for three months. He faces a minimum punishment of eight years in Azerbaijani prison. He is allowed no calls home, and sees his lawyer once a week.
Escaping Azerbaijan
Mustafayeva,33, and Mukhtarli left Baku for Tbilisi in 2015. Initially, they moved for Mustafayeva to study in a Georgian university, but had to stay indefinitely for fears of prosecution in Azerbaijan.
In early 2015, soon after Ismayilova’s arrest, Mukhtarli was tipped that he might be jailed, too. He had to speed up the move, ending in Tbilisi two weeks before his wife. He’s never been to Azerbaijan since.
But life in Tbilisi wasn’t entirely calm, too. Both Mukhtarli and Mustafayeva kept reporting on Aliyev’s family and Azeri government corruption for Meydan.TV, an Azeri media in exile, and OCCRP.
From time to time, Mustafayeva recalls, Mukhtarli would tell her that he was being followed in the street or that strangers were trying to overhear his conversations in cafes.
In January, a source told the couple that Ministry of Security of Azerbaijan had a dossier of Mukhtarli, with details about the family’s life in Tbilisi. The source advised them to move quickly.
Mustafayeva recalls that her nose started bleeding when she heard about the dossier. But despite the fear, the family decided not to move.
“What was the point?” says Mustafayeva. “They would have found us again.”
Leyla Mustafayeva, the wife of jailed Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Mukhtarli, plays with their three-year-old daughter Nuray in Riga, Latvia, on June 14.
Abduction
On the night of May 29, Mukhtarli left to see a friend. At the end of the meeting he called Mustafayeva. She asked him to pick up bread and sunflower seeds – a popular snack in many post-Soviet countries – on his way home.
That was the last time she heard his voice.
Mustafayeva, who is also a journalist, spent the evening working from home and then went to bed.
As she woke up next morning, Mukhtarli wasn’t home. She immediately knew something had happened to him.
As hours passed without news, Mustafayeva assumed that he was killed.
So when later in the day it was reported that Mukhtarli was in jail in Baku, her first reaction was surprise. This wasn’t a scenario she considered during these horrifying hours.
“My first thought was just ‘How?’” she recalls. “His passport was with me. How could he cross the border? I didn’t expect that.”
The statements from Azerbaijani government contradicted each other. At first, a lawmaker with the ruling party said that the arrest of Mukhtarli was an operation of the country’s special services.
But later, the Prosecutor’s Office of Azerbaijan said that Mukhtarli was arrested when he tried to illegally cross the border with 10,000 euros on him.
Mustafayeva says that there was no way that Mukhtarli could try to go to Azerbijan or that he had the money on him.
“We’ve never even such a sum of money in our life,” she says.
For more than two weeks, Mustafayeva, lawyers, and fellow journalists in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and other countries have been fighting for the release of Mukhtarli.
However, Mukhtarli is not the only person who needs Mustafayeva’s support right now, as she also takes care of their three-year-old daughter Nuray. To protect her, Mustafayeva told the girl that her father went to Baku to visit his mother.
Georgian police have been ineffective in their investigation of the case, Mustafayeva says. The police didn’t classify it as abduction, but as “a limitation of freedom.” They said that they obtained more than 30 CCTV videos that don’t show the abduction, and talked to 200 witnesses, who didn’t see anything.
She also said that it took two weeks before the police agreed to give her husband’s lawyer access to the case.
The international organizations and foreign governments have tuned in. U.S. Department of State on June 3 urged the government of Azerbaijan to release Mukhtarli and others “incarcerated for exercising their fundamental freedoms” in accordance with Azerbaijan’s international and OSCE commitments.
European Parliament on June 15 called for the release of Mukhtarli.
