VOA News | Tuesday, December 24, 2024 
Azerbaijani journalist says he was jailed over his work

WASHINGTON — A journalist jailed in Azerbaijan for nearly seven months has said he believes his arrest is linked to his reporting. Farid Mehralizada, an economist and journalist with VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has been jailed since May on charges including conspiring to smuggle foreign currency. The journalist, his employer and press freedom groups believe the case is retaliatory and part of a wider crackdown in Azerbaijan. In messages relayed to VOA through his wife, Mehralizada spoke about his passion for journalism and said he believed he was targeted for his work. “I’ve always enjoyed working with statistical data and numbers. As a journalist and economist, it was my job to interpret them,” Mehralizada said. Mehralizada says he believes he is being detained in retaliation for his work, which is often critical of the government’s economic policy. “I think my arrest highlighted how authoritarian governments, like Azerbaijan’s, fear the power of numbers and the reality they reveal through statistics,” Mehralizada said. Among the journalist’s criticisms was that the Azerbaijani government isn’t diversifying the economy’s reliance on oil and gas. Mehralizada is one of at least 14 journalists jailed in the past year for their work in Azerbaijan, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. Several of them work at Abzas Media, one of the country’s most prominent anti-corruption investigative outlets…Read more