On November 10, the Ganja military court considered the cases of eight more defendants in the “Terter case”.
In particular, the cases of a group of seven defendants were considered – Orkhan Babayev, Emin Aibov, Zaur Abdullayev, Veli Khalilov, Nijat Rzayev, Nijat Guluzade and Yalchyn Tanryverdizade, and separately another person involved Emil Aliyev.
The court stopped the proceedings against all eight accused and returned the case materials to the prosecutor’s office, which carries out procedural supervision over the preliminary investigation, the head of the Baku Human Rights Club, lawyer Rasul Jafarov, told Turan.
The lawyer noted that all the accused remain, despite the court’s decision, under arrest. “Since the preliminary investigation was conducted with the detention of the accused, the court did not change the measure of restraint,” he explained.
According to him, a new preliminary investigation will be conducted in the investigative department of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The human rights activist suggested that the criminal proceedings will be terminated on exculpatory grounds.
“It was in this order that 26 other convicts in the “Terter case” were acquitted. This is about 18 military and eight civilians who were convicted not on charges of treason, but on other criminal articles for short terms.
By 2019, all of them were already at large, but they still had a criminal record that restricts many rights. After the Prosecutor General’s Office updated the investigation, their cases were reviewed and in the summer and autumn of this year they were fully rehabilitated,” Jafarov said.
Earlier, on November 5, the cases of 11 persons convicted of the Terter events were returned to the preliminary investigation.
* After the April 2016 fighting in Azerbaijan, a group of military personnel was brought to the investigation.
The Prosecutor General’s Office, the State Security Service, the Ministry of Defense and the Interior Ministry in a joint statement claimed that the military were guilty of spying on Armenia. The public learned about the mass torture of detainees in May-June 2017 only in 2019.
According to human rights activists, more than 100 soldiers and officers were tortured, 25 soldiers were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, at least 9 people died from torture.
Later, some of the convicts were acquitted, and the perpetrators of torture were arrested.
The process of rehabilitation of illegally convicted is ongoing. Recently, arrests of officers involved in torture and illegal investigation have been carried out.
On September 5, Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev appealed to the Plenum of the Supreme Court with a request to review the sentences of 19 persons convicted in the “Terter case” (on charges of espionage in favor of Armenia).
On September 30, the Plenum of the Supreme Court sent the cases of 19 convicts in the “Terter case” for a new consideration by the Court of Appeal.
On November 2, the Ganja Court of Appeal decided to return the case to the court of first instance.