Last May, in a café in Tbilisi, Georgia, Afgan Mukhtarli phoned his wife to say that he was on his way home. She told him to pick up some bread. But Mukhtarli, an investigative journalist, never made it back. By the next day he was being held in neighbouring Azerbaijan, facing charges of smuggling €10,000 ($11,800) in cash across the border and resisting arrest.
Leyla Mustafayeva, Muktharli’s wife and a journalist herself, insists that Azerbaijani and Georgian state forces kidnapped her husband and took him across the border. This is backed up by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have dismissed the charges against Mukhtarli as politically motivated.
