Azerbaijani police ‘lock down’ city amidst reports of mass arrests and beatings

Local sources have told OC Media that police have locked down the city of Imishli and arrested over 100 in connection to protests that erupted after a police car fatally struck three schoolgirls.

The accident took place on 18 January in the village of Yalavaj, on the outskirts of the Imishli in southern Azerbaijan. Residents have said a police car hit the group of four schoolchildren as they travelled home from school.

One of the girls, a fourth grader called Ayan Mammadova, died immediately, with sixth-grader Zumrud Miraliyeva passing away shortly after. A third girl, Mahbuba Alizada, sustained grave injuries and passed away in the early hours of Wednesday. The fourth, a boy, was the only survivor.

Following the accident, residents of Yalavaj held a spontaneous protest, smashing the police car and shouting ‘resignation’. It is unclear whose resignation they were calling for.

Azerbaijan reportedly deployed internal troops to disperse the protest.

Tahir Mammadov, the father of one of the killed schoolchildren, told AbzasMedia on 19 January that access to the internet had been limited in Yalavaj after the protests.

‘Even mobile signals were lost. We couldn’t make calls or send messages. After that, many people were summoned to the police station for questioning’.

A source from Imishli told OC Media on the condition of anonymity that the situation remained tense as of Tuesday, and that ‘more than 100 people’ had been detained.

‘The entrance and exit of the district are under police control. The district is full of police and for now, police outnumber the residents’, the source said, adding that tensions were largely focused in the centre of Imishli.

The source added that the police had identified and tortured people involved in the protest which erupted in the aftermath of the accident, and that the police had summoned those who had written about the accident and the protest on social media.

‘Whoever wrote about this accident was summoned to the police station and had their posts deleted — thus the police station is full of the summoned residents’, the source said.

Members of opposition parties were also among those reportedly detained by the police.

Protests erupt in Azerbaijani village after police car fatally hits 2 children

A police car has hit four schoolchildren in Yalavaj, killing two.

OC MediaAytan Farhadova

Gulu Mammadli, a member of the local branch of the opposition Popular Front Party, told OC Media that he was summoned by the police on 19 January.

‘I wrote about the internal troops entering Imishli on Facebook right after I saw them; after several hours, at 23:30 three plainclothes officers in a civilian car came to my house in the Sabirabad district and said that I should meet with the head of the Sabiarabad District Police. They told me that if I rejected the order they would take me by force, so I went to the police station,’ Mammadli told OC Media.

Mammadli added that the police confiscated his phone and that he was forced to delete his Facebook post at the police station.

Meydan TV reported that other opposition party members were summoned by the police for writing about the protests, saying that their social media accounts were hacked and their posts were deleted. Alikram Khurshidov, a member of the Musavat party, was among those reportedly detained, with his relatives telling Meydan TV that he was subjected to electric shock torture and given 10 days of detention.

‘Traffic police in Imishli abuse all residents’

The anonymous source in Imishli told OC Media that they believed that tensions escalated in the city and nearby village because the accident was ‘caused by the police’.

‘If it had been an ordinary person, such tensions would not have happened’, they said. ‘Traffic police in Imishli abuse all residents, they could fine everyone saying that they violated the traffic rules.’

The source added that the traffic police were reinforced in numbers from other districts, in addition to the presence of the internal troops.

Tahir Mammadov, the father of one of the killed schoolchildren, demanded on Sunday that the officer involved be punished.

State news agency APA has reported that the Interior Ministry invited the family of the four children to view details of the accident, video recordings, and the progress of the investigation.

Days after the accident, the Prosecutor General’s Office pressed charges against 17-year-old Baylar Bayramli, accusing him of causing the accident in Yalavaj. They said that he had illegally taken possession of a relative’s car, driven it without a license, and violated traffic rules resulting in the death of two people through negligence.

He was charged with fleeing the scene of a traffic accident and, based on the petition of the investigator and the submission of the prosecutor in charge of the preliminary investigation, was placed in pretrial detention.

A number of residents of Yalavaj had written on social media that Bayramli was buying bread at the time of the accident. Dashcam footage released by the police shows the police car failing to stop when a car, believed to be Bayramli’s, crosses over to the opposite lane to make a turn. The police car then swerves to the right to avoid hitting the car, crashing into the group of children on the pavement.

On Wednesday, APA reported that 14 people had been arrested in Imishli and given three months of detention on charges of hooliganism. The list of detainees includes Bayramli’s name — it is unclear if it is the same person accused of causing the accident.

APA’s coverage of the accident as reactions to it were taking place stated that the two girls who had died on the scene were the ‘nephews of the police officer who committed the accident’.

The state news agency later cited the Interior Ministry as blaming another driver for driving in front of the police car ‘on its way to work’.

Deadly Azerbaijan Airlines crash sheds light on twin crises of migrant labour, border closure

The majority of victims were Azerbaijani citizens going to Russia for work.

OC MediaAytan Farhadova