Azerbaijan says brothers arrested by Russia were tortured and beaten to death

By Nailia Bagirova and Lucy Papachristou

BAKU (Reuters) -Post-mortems on two Azerbaijani brothers who died in Russian police custody have shown that they were beaten to death, authorities in the South Caucasus country said on Tuesday as tensions rose sharply between Moscow and Baku.

Azerbaijani prosecutors said they had opened a criminal investigation into the alleged murders of Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov following their arrest last week in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

The case concerns "the torture and deliberate killing with particular cruelty of Azerbaijani citizens and ethnic Azerbaijanis by officers of law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation", the state prosecutor's office said.

In a further deepening of the crisis, Azerbaijan on Monday detained a group of Russian state media employees on suspicion of fraud, drawing a protest from Moscow.

On Tuesday, an Azerbaijani government source told Reuters that about 15 more Russians had been arrested separately on suspicion of drug trafficking and cybercrime. The source shared videos showing them being handcuffed, made to march in line, and being bundled into police vans.

The cases threaten to severely damage relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country that has close ties with Turkey.

Russia summoned the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow on Tuesday to receive an official protest over "the latest unfriendly actions of Baku, deliberate steps by the Azerbaijani side to dismantle bilateral relations", the Russian foreign ministry said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the journalists' arrests were an "extremely emotional reaction" by Azerbaijan, and Russia aimed to negotiate their release.

FORENSIC TESTS

The chain of events began last week when investigators in Yekaterinburg, a Russian industrial city, conducted scores of raids against ethnic Azerbaijanis whom they suspected of complicity in historic unsolved crimes, including serial killings.

Russian investigators initially said Ziyaddin had died of heart failure and did not give a cause for death for Huseyn. The bodies of the men arrived in Baku on Monday evening.

Adalat Hasanov, head of forensic examination at Azerbaijan's health ministry, said fresh post-mortems showed the brothers both died of "post-traumatic shock" due to severe beatings.

Russian examiners' assertion that Ziyaddin, who was born in 1970, died of heart failure, was a "blatant falsehood", Hasanov told reporters.

"During the follow-up examination, we discovered multiple fractures on Ziyaddin's body resulting from beatings. All of his ribs were broken, and a haemorrhage was found on his head, also caused by blunt force trauma," he said.

The other brother, Huseyn, born in 1966, also died as a result of beatings, Hasanov said. He said all of the deceased internal organs had been removed during the previous autopsy in Russia, "which may indicate an attempt to conceal the true cause of death".

Azerbaijan and Russia have traded barbs since the men's deaths, with Baku accusing Russian police of carrying out extrajudicial killings "on ethnic grounds", an allegation Moscow has rejected. Russian investigators said all the six men arrested held Russian passports.

The Azerbaijani police raid targeting Russian journalists in Baku was conducted at the office of Sputnik Azerbaijan, the local branch of the state-run Rossiya Segodnya news agency.

An Azerbaijani source said two people had been placed under formal arrest and five others were still under investigation. The case relates to alleged fraud, illegal entrepreneurship and money laundering, the source said.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku and Lucy Papachristou in London; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Ros Russell and Alex Richardson)