Azerbaijani opposition leader Tofig Yagublu sentenced to nine years in prison

The Baku Grave Crimes Court has sentenced Azerbaijani opposition leader Tofig Yagublu to nine years in prison after finding him guilty of fraud and forgery. Yagublu has repeatedly denied the accusations, and has announced that he will start a hunger strike in prison.

At the final hearing on Monday, Yagublu made a closing speech during which he reportedly said that the charges ‘without exception were pulled out of thin air, and all this is because I am an opposition politician’.

According to the indictment, an Azerbaijani citizen seeking citizenship in Germany, Elshan Huseynov, transferred €25,000 ($27,300) and ₼10,000 ($5,900) to Yagublu via an individual named Elnur Mammadov. The money was allegedly intended to aid Huseynov in obtaining a visa to Germany.

Yagublu has consistently claimed that this accusation is false, and that he has not received a single manat from anyone, adding that ‘Mammadov and Huseynov did this for sabotage purposes’.

Yagublu, the former deputy chair of the Musavat Party and a member of the opposition alliance the National Council of Democratic Forces, was originally detained in relation to this case in December 2023, after which his house was raided.

According to the testimony of his wife, Maya Yagublu, when police searched their house, they placed a wad of money under a mattress, which they then proceeded to ‘find’. She noted that she did not sign any documentation regarding this raid.

During the pretrial investigation process, Yagublu’s legal team claimed on social media that Mammadov had committed the charges the authorities were accusing Yagublu of.

Mammadov has been involved in several different criminal cases, most recently in 2018 when he was charged with committing fraud against a relative, Orkhan Mehraliyev.

Mammadov, who was also a defendant in the investigation, was charged with fraud and the use of a forged document. On Monday, he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Following the announcement that Yagublu would begin a hunger strike, Yagublu’s daughter, Nigar Hazi, told OC Media that her father would not change his mind.

‘My father is very strict in his decisions and he told the court that if “I am released at 75 years old, is this a life? If it is [not a life], I will choose to die before” ’, Hazi said.

Previously, Yagublu was arrested in 2013 on charges of organising protests in the central Azerbaijani district of Ismayilli. He was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison, before being released in 2017 as part of an official group pardon.

In March 2020, he was arrested again, this time on charges of hooliganism. According to the prosecution, Yagublu had been involved in a traffic accident, after which he insulted and caused bodily harm to the driver of the other car and his wife. In September 2020, the Nizami District Court sentenced him to four years and three months in prison.

Immediately after the verdict was announced, Yagublu stated that he had started a hunger strike in protest against the injustice of the trial. He continued the hunger strike for 17 days before being transferred to a clinic.

Later that month, he was released to house arrest by the Baku Court of Appeal.

In July 2021, the same court replaced his original sentence with that of a suspended one.

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OC MediaAytan Farhadova