Speaking of the court session, lawyer Elchin Sadigov said Jalilabad Regional Executive Power’s response letter had been presented at the hearing. The letter read that no record was kept on the incident day and there was no surveillance camera in the executive power head’s reception room.
The lawyer also noted that the court had received a response letter from Jalilabad Central Regional Hospital. The letter said the emergency call from the executive power had been received at 11.58 am. The lawyer reminded that the act drawn up by the executive power indicated that the ambulance had picked up the victim at 10.30 am.
Sadigov went on to quote a previous document submitted by the hospital as showing that the victim’s admission hour was 3.30 pm and noting that the victim had come to the hospital on her own.
The lawyer stressed that all the documents had been falsified.
The next hearing was set for 11 May.
Background: Afgan Sadigov, the founder and chief editor of Azel.tv news website based in the southern part of the country, was detained on 22 November 2016. He was charged under Article 127.2.3 (deliberate infliction of minor serious harm to health in a publicly dangerous way or from hooligan prompting) of the Criminal Code.
The charges stem from an incident involving him and a woman that occurred in the regional executive power building in August 2016. The indictment bill alleged that the journalist had injured the woman. The journalist and his lawyer called the charges spurious during the trial. The lawyer’s motion to obtain the footages of the security cameras in the executive power building, where the incident took place, had been rejected by the court.