Son fears father could die after year in Azeri detention

Gubad Ibadoghlu was driving home with his wife in northern Baku, Azerbaijan, when several cars rammed into them.

- TOM WATLING

The senior fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) was in town to visit his ailing mother, who could no longer walk.

Two dozen plainclothes officers rushed out of the vehicles and beat the couple, who had been chased out of the country six years earlier by an administration that Professor Gubad's supporters say was angered by his anti-corruption efforts.

The officers dragged the couple screaming into the back of the unmarked cars, slammed the doors and drove them to a detention centre.

"That is how Azerbaijani politics works," claims the couple's 24year-old son, Ibad Byaramov. "If you are in the opposition, there is a very high chance that you will get imprisoned."

The beating, exactly a year ago, was just the beginning of the troubles for Prof Gubad and wife, Irada Bayramova. He is now facing 17 years imprisonment. His pre-trial detention has been extended on multiple occasions, the latest until at least 20 August. He spent nine months in prison and was refused proper access to his lawyers, to the outside and, crucially, to healthcare, before being put under house arrest, where he is safer but still unable to receive the treatment he needs for diabetes and a heart aneurysm.

Ibad says the prison authorities falsified his father's health records while in detention, playing down the extent of the aneurysm, and have since denied him access to hospitals, leaving him in grave danger.