BAKU -- An Azerbaijani journalist, who has worked as a freelancer for RFE/RL, says she was attacked by an unknown man armed with a knife who threatened and intimidated her over her coverage of a high-profile murder trial.
Aytan Mammadova said on May 9 that she had filed a complaint with the Baku city police over the attack, which took place late the previous night in the elevator in her apartment building.
Mammadova has been covering the ongoing trial of a man suspected of murdering a 10-year-old girl in 2019. She was one of the few journalists who traveled from the capital, Baku, to Ganja, a city in western Azerbaijan, for almost every court session.
In Azerbaijan, the story has caught the public's attention, in part because the suspect on trial has insisted that police tortured him to force him to confess to the murder.
"When the elevator doors shut, he grabbed my jaw with one hand and put a knife to my neck with the other hand," Mammadova said of the incident. "The knife went deep into the skin. He removed the knife, but then put it back on my neck again, leaving a cut mark."
According to Mammadova, the attacker said to her: "You have not gotten wiser," started cursing her daughter, and warned her "not to write about the case."
When the elevator reached Mammadova's floor, she fled to her apartment while the man stayed inside and went back down to the ground floor. Mammadova's husband tried to catch up with the attacker but could not find him.
International Outcry
Independent journalists and rights activists in Azerbaijan signed an open appeal to President Ilham Aliyev and law enforcement to find and punish those responsible for the attack on Mammadova.
Aliyev, 60, has ruled the oil-producing former Soviet republic with an iron hand since shortly before his father, Heydar Aliyev, died in 2003 after a decade in power.
The president has repeatedly rejected criticism from rights groups and Western governments that accuse him of jailing his opponents on trumped-up accusations and abusing power to stifle dissent.
The authors of the appeal said the attack on Mammadova was "an attack on freedom of speech and press."
An Interior Ministry spokesperson later announced that a criminal probe into the incident had been opened.
The attack triggered international condemnation, including from the U.S. Embassy in Baku. "We are closely monitoring the case and call on the authorities to investigate and bring those responsible to justice," it said in a post on Twitter.
That message was echoed by Teresa Ribeiro, the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, in a Twitter post.
RFE/RL President Jamie Fly also condemned the attack. "I strongly condemn this unacceptable intimidation of our freelancer, which is clearly intended to deter her from pursuing an important story," Fly said in a statement. "We call on the Azerbaijani authorities to investigate this attack and to protect journalists from harassment."
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it was “shocked by the violence” in a Twitter statement on the attack and urged authorities to investigate.
Azerbaijan ranked 154th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' 2021 World Press Freedom Index.