The wife of independent Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Sadigov, Sevinj Sadigova, said on Monday that several masked individuals had forcibly taken her husband to the Azerbaijani Prosecutor General’s Office. The reports emerged two months after a Georgian court deported Sadigov to Azerbaijan.
As Sadigova noted in a Facebook livestream, her husband was detained at 17:00 local time in Jalilabad — around 200 kilometres away from Baku — and was taken to an unknown location ‘by the President Ilham Aliyev’s regime’.
‘I’m calling it a kidnapping because four or five men in black masks, four or five cars, and a group of men took Afgan to an unknown location’, she said, noting that Sadigov was ‘forced into a car without any explanation [...] And driven away’.
‘When his relatives asked where they were taking him, they replied, “We’ll handle it ourselves. Mind your own business. If you don't want trouble, don’t ask anything” ’, she added.
Later, Sadigova posted on Facebook that Sadigov had been taken to the Prosecutor General’s Office in Baku.
Sadigova further noted in her livestream that there was a camera in the house where Sadigov was taken from, but ‘they removed it and took it away’.
Sadigov has been in Azerbaijan since 5 April, after being deported from Georgia, where he had lived for more than two years. The decision to extradite him was issued by a Georgian court in a late-night hearing.
The trial was preceded by Sadigov’s surprise detention several hours earlier for allegedly ‘insulting’ Georgian police online, which was cited as the official reason for his deportation.
The ruling came despite Sadigov being under an international protection order barring his extradition to Azerbaijan over human rights concerns.
His deportation took place the day before Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived in Georgia on an official visit. Some have linked the court decision to Aliyev’s visit.
Shortly before Sadigov’s deportation to Azerbaijan, on 1 April, Baku had reportedly dropped a criminal case that had been opened against him years earlier and returned his passport. However, on 26 May, Sadigov said he was still being prevented from leaving the country and reuniting with his family in the EU.
Sadigov’s case
Sadigov, who runs the YouTube channel Azel.TV, has twice faced prison in Azerbaijan, alongside a number of administrative arrests, and has previously been recognised by international organisations as a political prisoner.
He arrived in Georgia with his family in December 2023 with plans to leave for a third country. In July 2024, he said he was prevented from departing from Tbilisi International Airport and told he could only travel to Azerbaijan. His lawyers have attributed this to the termination of his Azerbaijani passport.
Soon after, in August 2024, Sadigov was detained by Georgian authorities pending an extradition trial at Baku’s request. Azerbaijan sought Sadigov’s extradition from Georgia for nearly two years, reportedly accusing him of fraud or extortion.
In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) enacted interim measures barring his extradition until they could hear his case. As a result, Sadigov was released from pre-extradition in Tbilisi in April 2025, but, according to his lawyers, on bail with a travel ban.
After his release, Sadigov continued his sharp criticism of both the Azerbaijani and Georgian authorities, frequently attending anti-government protests in Tbilisi and expressing solidarity with detained dissenters in both countries.
Critics of the ruling Georgian Dream party described Sadigov’s deportation as a violation of the ECHR decision. Georgia’s Interior Ministry disputed this, noting that at the time of Sadigov’s deportation, the criminal case against him in Azerbaijan — for which Baku had previously sought his extradition — had been dropped.
However, critics emphasised that the suspension of the case in Azerbaijan and Sadigov’s deportation from Tbilisi to Baku on other grounds did not mean that Georgia did not violate the ECHR ruling. They noted that the ECHR had determined that Georgia could not extradite him to Baku until the case was substantively resolved in Strasbourg.
In addition, doubts were also raised that the suspension of the case against Sadigov in Azerbaijan — which was soon followed, on 3 April, by the Georgian court lifting his travel restrictions and bail — was part of a plan by the two countries to create loopholes for Sadigov’s deportation.
Azerbaijan has in recent years detained scores of independent journalists on a variety of charges — most often for the alleged smuggling of foreign currency — in a sweeping crackdown on independent news outlets and civil society groups.
