Azerbaijan is witnessing public outcry over the death of 17-year-old Elgun Ibrahimov. According to circulating reports, the teen filmed police officers transporting drugs. Opposition blogger Manaf Jalizade claims the officers noticed him, chased him down, beat him, and gouged out his eyes.
To conceal the crime, the police allegedly threw Elgun from the fifth-floor balcony of a dormitory, staging the incident as a suicide, the Geghard Analytical Foundation reports.
Elgun’s family vehemently denies the suicide narrative, asserting he was assaulted and suffered a serious head injury. Weeks later, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the State Security Service released a joint statement rejecting the murder allegations, claiming there were no signs of violence on his body and that he died in hospital from injuries sustained in a fall.
Contradicting this, a report from a hospital in Ganja stated that the teen arrived with severe head trauma and bruises across his abdomen and other areas, indicating he had been beaten.
Amid growing mistrust in the authorities, blogger Tural Sadigli has offered €5,000 to anyone who can identify the killer, rejecting the state’s version of events.
Activist Nijat Amiraslanov was arrested and sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention for distributing flyers calling for justice in Elgun’s case. In Baku, on International Children’s Day, a group of youth staged a protest under the slogan “Justice for Ibrahimov,” handing out flyers, displaying posters, and urging the public and authorities to uncover the truth.
The protest was broken up by plainclothes police, who arrested participants and those filming. Unofficial sources say over 60 people were detained, including minors and young women, some of whom were subjected to sexually abusive language by officers.
Protesters' phones were confiscated, their private messages and contacts reviewed, and passwords to social media accounts forcibly changed. People connected to the demonstrators received threatening messages from fake Interior Ministry accounts, warning: “You are too active in comments—don’t cause me trouble.”
Human rights defender Gulnara Mehdiyeva noted that while some detainees were released, their phones were not returned. “We don’t know the exact number because no independent journalist could document the events,” she said.
Back in 2007, President Ilham Aliyev declared that no police officer would be punished for using force during protests, calling it part of their “professional duty.” He reaffirmed this stance in 2013, stating that law enforcement personnel would face no penalties. As such, peaceful protests are criminalized, while police drug-trafficking and rights violations are treated as duty-bound acts.
