On June 3rd the police carried out a raid in Nasimi district of Baku, where they detained several newspaper vendors and took them to the police station#22, www.gundemxeber.az reports.
According to gundemxeber.az, the police arrested the vendors selling newspapers in parks and other dense urban areas, confiscated their newspapers and forcibly took them to the police office.
Our repeated calls to the police station#22 remained unanswered. Ehsan Zahidov, head of the press service of the Interior Ministry, said they had not received such a report.
“Reports on arrest of news vendors is nothing but false. The police would only demand them to leave certain areas on the ground that street sale of newspapers is banned by the Baku City Executive Power” said Zahidov.
Although IRFS obtained the contact phone numbers of some of the detained vendors, they did not answer our repeated calls either.
“I have been working as a news vendor for a long time. I earn my living out of it. But such kind of interventions cause big trouble for me and others for whom street sale of papers is the only source of income” an experienced paper-seller Intigam Aslanov told the IRFS.