BAKU -- Relatives and a lawyer of former Azerbaijani diplomat Emin Ibrahimov said on July 23 that police had detained the government critic a day earlier for allegedly stabbing a person, a charge Ibrahimov rejects as totally fabricated.
Ibrahimov's lawyer Aqil Layic said his client told him an unknown person had attacked him near a metro station in Baku late on July 22. Immediately after, several men in plainclothes appeared at the site and took him to the Nizami district police department.
"The detention of a diplomat looks like a new tendency. Emin Ibrahimov said that he is the victim of a provocation. He rejects the charge as he insists he did not commit the crime he is charged with," Layic said, adding a court must decide on his client's pretrial restrictions within 48 hours of his detention.
Layic said Ibrahimov told him police used an electric-shock device to force him to reveal the PIN for his mobile phone.
The Interior Ministry confirmed Ibrahimov's detention, saying he was held after he stabbed a person born in 1987, whose identity was not disclosed, during a brawl. According to the ministry, the stabbed man was hospitalized.
If convicted, Ibrahimov faces up to eight years in prison.
The 43-year-old Ibrahimov used to work at the Azerbaijani Embassy in the United States and held other diplomatic posts as well.
In recent years, he criticized the government for Baku's worsening relations with the West, among other things.
In September, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail on a charge of "spreading harmful information" after an online post criticizing Russia and calling for peaceful solution of Azerbaijan's conflict with Armenia over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.