Ahmad Mammadli, founder of independent social media-based outlet Yoldash Media, has been detained since May 2025 on charges of hooliganism and causing serious bodily harm, which have been widely denounced as fabricated.
Mammadli is one of at least 25 journalists and media workers from some of Azerbaijan’s last independent news outlets jailed in an unprecedented crackdown on the independent press since late 2023. The wave of arrests has occurred amid declining relations with the West and a surge in Azerbaijani authoritarianism and following Azerbaijan’s recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic Armenian rule in September 2023.
Police in Baku arrested Mammadli on the night of May 6, 2025, accusing him of stabbing a man during a dispute in a shared taxi. He has denied the charges and linked them to his journalism.
Azerbaijani authorities commonly use trumped-up charges of hooliganism and violence against journalists and government critics, including allegations of stabbings.
Exile-based independent journalist Elmaddin Shamilzade told CPJ that during the arrest, at least two plainclothes police officers boarded a taxi with Mammadli and began beating him. They then took him to an unmarked car, beat him, and shocked him with an unknown weapon when he refused to provide his phone’s password.
Shamilzade told CPJ that the charges were false and that Mammadli, a former activist who recently switched to journalism, had been arrested as “one of the few individuals left in Azerbaijan with the audacity to cover sensitive topics,” such as political trials.
On May 8, a court ordered Mammadli to be held in pretrial detention for four months. If found guilty on charges of hooliganism and causing serious bodily harm, he faces up to 11 years in prison.
On August 21, a preliminary hearing in Mammadli’s trial was held in Baku.
As of late August 2025, Mammadli remains in Baku Pretrial Detention Center No. 1. In June, an advocacy group established for Mammadli’s defense reported that the journalist’s eyesight remained blurry more than a month after being heavily struck in the eye during his arrest, writing that Mammadli had twice undergone eye surgery a year before and that a prison doctor had warned that he could lose his vision. A fellow detainee reported seeing Mammadli with a “swollen face” several weeks after his arrest. Shamilzade told CPJ in August that Mammadli’s vision had since improved but that he also suffers from asthma.
CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, in August 2025, and the office of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in September 2025 for comment, but did not receive any replies.