The last group of military officials have been sentenced as part of the ‘Tartar Case’, which saw hundreds of victims accuse high-ranking military officials of torture. 

On Thursday, Fuad Aghayev, a lawyer for the military corps and the legal assistant of General Hikmat Hasanov, who victims accused of supervising torture sessions, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Ramil Ahmadov, assistant to the head of the military unit’s personnel department, was sentenced to nine years and six months in prison, as was Commander Fuad Akhundov, who headed the illegal interrogation facility. Warrant officers Javid Aghadadashov and Gurban Jumshudov were each sentenced to six years.

According to RFE/RL and other sources, around 450 Azerbaijani soldiers were tortured as part of a witch hunt to flush out alleged Armenian spies following armed clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2016. Human rights defenders have said at least nine people were killed in the process. Details of the case remained secret for several years after the spate of torture ended. The incident became known as the Tartar Case, taking the name from the district of Azerbaijan where the torture occurred. 

The case began in May 2017, when several Azerbaijani law enforcement agencies claimed ‘a group of military officers and civilians of weak will betrayed the nation, the homeland and the state, lost the spirit of citizenship and devotion to the motherland, and engaged in secret cooperation with enemy intelligence by repeatedly giving them information of military secrecy for the sake of their financial interests’.

At the time, reports spread on social media that hundreds of suspects had been detained as part of the case. Reports of widespread torture also circulated online, which the authorities denied.

In 2019, however, a group of 12 army officers were arrested on torture charges; they were later convicted and sentenced to three-and-a-half to ten years in prison. 

In November 2021, Azerbaijan’s chief military prosecutor, Khanlar Valiyev, admitted to journalists for the first time that over 100 suspects had been subjected to physical abuse during the 2017 investigation, leading to the death of at least one person. 

The following month, after a protest was held in Baku, the General Prosecutor’s Office announced they were creating a special working group to ‘investigate objectively and comprehensively every single unlawful act’ in the Tartar case. 

Since the case broke publicly, 13 military officials have been charged, with their cases going to trial in a series of groups. Thursday’s sentencing was the last to be held. 

‘There is not any compensation for what we faced’

Mushfig Ahmadli, 34, a former officer who was arrested in May 2017 and tortured before being released in December 2022, told OC Media that he was dissatisfied with the verdict, considering the punishment to be too lenient. He also claimed that a fair investigation had not been carried out, and that the real organisers of the Tartar case were left unpunished. 

‘I saw 90% of the officers who tortured me. That is why I know them and I wrote about them in the indictment. I saw Fuad Aghayev, Babak Samidli, Mubariz Rzayev, Hikmat Hasanov, Giyas Abbasov, Teymur Mammadov, Babak Javadov and others’ Ahmadli said. 

He told OC Media that he had been tortured in a variety of ways for around eight days. During the interrogation, military officials accused him and others of ‘treason against the homeland’, claiming that ‘there was someone who sold information to Armenia, and that someone brought soldiers to the Armenian troops like sex workers’.

Before he met the corps commander at Margushavan, he said that he and other detainees were given anal examinations several times by the corps’ doctors. Once at the military camp, he was waterboarded, given electroshocks and had his nails and teeth removed. 

Ahmadli told OC Media that military officials threatened his mother’s life to try and force him to confess.  

‘At that time my mother suffered in the Barda Diagnostic Centre, and they told me that they knew which hospital room my mother was in and if I didn’t confess, they might add the wrong medicine to her herbs.’

Following his false confession, Ahmadli was sentenced to 16 years in prison, but served only five years and seven months, after which he was released along with 19 other victims. 

The following year, in 2023, he received ₼120,000 ($44,000) as compensation. However, he says that he is still unable to work due to the torture he received, and suffers from multiple health issues. 

‘No one asked us for forgiveness. My family was also destroyed. They called us traitors of the country — there is not any compensation for what we faced,’ Ahmadli told OC Media.