WASHINGTON — A journalist jailed in Azerbaijan for nearly seven months has said he believes his arrest is linked to his reporting.

Farid Mehralizada, an economist and journalist with VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has been jailed since May on charges including conspiring to smuggle foreign currency. The journalist, his employer and press freedom groups believe the case is retaliatory and part of a wider crackdown in Azerbaijan.

In messages relayed to VOA through his wife, Mehralizada spoke about his passion for journalism and said he believed he was targeted for his work.

“I’ve always enjoyed working with statistical data and numbers. As a journalist and economist, it was my job to interpret them,” Mehralizada said.

Mehralizada says he believes he is being detained in retaliation for his work, which is often critical of the government’s economic policy.

“I think my arrest highlighted how authoritarian governments, like Azerbaijan’s, fear the power of numbers and the reality they reveal through statistics,” Mehralizada said. Among the journalist’s criticisms was that the Azerbaijani government isn’t diversifying the economy’s reliance on oil and gas.

Mehralizada is one of at least 14 journalists jailed in the past year for their work in Azerbaijan, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. Several of them work at Abzas Media, one of the country’s most prominent anti-corruption investigative outlets.

Mehralizada did not work with Abzas Media but he sometimes provided expert commentary to the outlet. Still, he is facing charges of “conspiring to smuggle foreign currency” in connection to a case brought against Abzas Media. Mehralizada denies the charge. Mehralizada and Abzas Media have both said that he never worked for the outlet.

Mehralizada is facing additional charges of “illegal entrepreneurship, money laundering, tax evasion and document forgery.” He faces up to 12 years behind bars if convicted of all the charges against him. He denies the accusations.

A trial against Mehralizada and six Abzas Media staffers began on Dec. 17 in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. Press freedom groups say the charges against the group of journalists are politically motivated.

The trial “epitomizes the way the Azerbaijani government has used retaliatory criminal charges to lock up vast swathes of the country’s leading independent journalists over the past year,” Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, said in a statement.

RFE/RL has condemned the trial and called for Mehralizada’s immediate release.

“Farid is being punished for reporting uncomfortable truths about Azerbaijan’s economy. Azerbaijan must end this sham trial and release Farid to his wife and newborn daughter,” RFE/RL President Stephen Capus said in a statement last week.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called for the release of Mehralizada and other journalists jailed in Azerbaijan.

“The United States is deeply concerned not only by these detentions, but by the increasing crackdown on civil society and media in Azerbaijan,” Blinken said in a statement earlier in December.

Azerbaijan’s Washington embassy and foreign ministry did not reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment.

When the trial began, Mehralizada’s wife, Nargiz Mukhtarova, said it was difficult to see her husband and the other defendants in handcuffs.

“But their courage was incredibly impressive,” she told VOA. “They were smiling during [the] hearing.”

In prison, Mukhtarova said, her husband spends his days reading books — nearly 200 of them since he was detained — and doing crossword puzzles. He is being treated well, but without internet access, he “mostly suffers” from a lack of economic news, Mukhtarova added.

Mukhtarova and her husband are permitted one weekly meeting, which she said they always look forward to.

“He is doing good,” she said. “His mood is better now because at least they have a chance to talk publicly about their case.”

The trial is set to resume on Dec. 28.
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