Azerbaijan rights activist Leyla Yunus set free after interrogation

Leyla Yunus, head of the Peace and Democracy NGO who was detained together with her husband Arif Yunus at Baku airport late yesterday, was released after hours of interrogation at the Prosecutor-General’s Office.

Yunus said she was asked about her relations with Rauf Mirqadirov, a politics correspondent with Zerkalo newspaper who was arrested on Armenian espionage charges on April 19.

“I said that I know Rauf Mirqadirov as a good journalist and that I attended several events with him,” Yunus said.

Police searched Yunus’s Baku apartment yesterday. The search will continue at her offices, Turan news agency said.

Defense lawyer Fuad Agayev said the detention was part of an investigation started earlier this month into alleged Armenian espionage by a group of Azeri rights activists.

Azerbaijan is in a state of war with Armenia, which captured the Nagorno Karabakh region and seven adjacent districts from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.

Major hostilities ended with a ceasefire in 1994 but no peace agreement has been signed.

Bakudaily.az