Azerbaijan
Editor sentenced; Reporter attacked, beatenPosted Jun 20 2007
On Friday April 20 two unidentified men beat Uzeyir Jafarov, an editor and reporter for the Azeri-language daily Gündalik Azarbaycan, in the capital, Baku. According to Jafarov, as s reporter by the Committee to Protect Journalists, he was beaten with some type of metal object around midnight when he was walking to his car. He told CPJ that though he covers military affairs for Gündalik Azarbaycan, he believed the newspaper's critical reporting provoked the attack. Earlier in the day he had testified in defense of his editor, Eynulla Fatullayev, founder of Gündalik Azarbaycan and the independent Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan, who was convicted and imprisoned on criminal charges of libel. Fatullayev was handed a two and a half year sentence for “defaming” and “insulting” Azerbaijanis in an article about the murder of Azeris in Khojali, a town in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Reporters Without Boarders said.