Mutvali Shikhlinski, the son of the head of the Azerbaijani diaspora in Sverdlovsky oblast, Shahin Shikhlinski, was detained on Monday evening in Yekaterinburg, after allegedly striking police officers with his car during his father’s arrest.
Russian media outlet E1.ru reported that as police tried to arrest Shahin Shkhlinski on 1 July, Mutvali Shikhlinski backed up a car and hit an officer with the vehicle’s door, causing him to hit his head on the asphalt.
He was detained on Tuesday — more than two weeks after the incident — on charges of using violence against a government official. He will stand trial at the Leninsky District Court of Yekaterinburg on Wednesday.
‘According to preliminary data, investigators will request the arrest of Mutvali, in which case he will be held in a pretrial detention center during the investigation’, wrote E1.ru.
‘Details of the detention have become known. It’s expected that Mutvali's home is to be searched. Currently, he is being detained for two days; after that, there will be a trial’, the outlet reported.
Shahin Shikhlinski was detained on 1 July in connection to a criminal case against two ethnic Azerbaijani brothers — Ziyaddin and Huseyn Safarov — who both died during the process of their arrest days before. The Safarov brothers were accused of a series of murders and attempted murders committed in Yekaterinburg in 2001–2011. Their deaths, which Baku said were the result of beating and torture, an allegation disputed by the Kremlin, set off a spat between Russia and Azerbaijan that appears to be ongoing.
Aytan Farhadova
In an interview with local Russian media, Mutvali Shikhlinski stated that his father had previously been interrogated decades ago in connection with the same case, but then released.
Both father and son are lawyers and are registered on the official web page of the Bar Association of the Sverdlovsk oblast.
Shahin Shikhlinski is a high-profile figure in Yekaterinburg’s Azerbaijani community, and is the owner of several companies and non-commercial organisations including Azerbaijan–Ural, a national cultural organisation, which organises celebrations for Azerbaijani national holidays.
According to Azerbaijani pro-government media outlet Olaylar.az, Shahin Shikhlinski finances a programme about Azerbaijan that airs twice a week on two federal TV channels in Yekaterinburg. ‘In Russia, there is only one officially registered Azerbaijani school — in Yekaterinburg. He managed to open the Azerbaijan Consulate General in Yekaterinburg’, the outlet reported.
His son, Mutvali Shikhlinski, owns several restaurants in Yekaterinburg.
Dozens of other Azerbaijanis have been arrested by Russian authorities in Yekaterinburg amidst heightened tensions between Moscow and Baku, which have been ongoing since the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane near the Kazakh city of Aktau in December 2024. Azerbaijan blames Russia for the tragedy.
In response to the detentions in Yekaterinburg, Baku has detained and arrested about two dozen Russian citizens, including journalists from the pro-Kremlin agency Sputnik-Azerbaijan, whose license was revoked in February.
Javid Agha
