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BAKU: Post-mortems conducted in Baku on two Azerbaijani men who died last week after they were arrested by Russian police show that they were beaten to death, a state forensic examiner said on Tuesday.
The deaths of the men, brothers named Ziyaddin and Huseyn Safarov, have raised diplomatic tensions between Moscow and Baku and led to the tit-for-tat arrests of Russian state media journalists working in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Russia was summoned to the foreign ministry in Moscow on Tuesday to receive an official protest against Baku’s “unfriendly actions” and the “illegal detention” of the journalists.
The rift between Russia and Azerbaijan has widened after investigators in Yekaterinburg, a Russian industrial city, conducted scores of raids last week targeting ethnic Azerbaijanis whom they suspected of complicity in historic unsolved crimes, including serial killings.
The Safarov brothers died during the raids, in which six people were arrested. 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 for forensic examination.
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, is 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.
On Monday, police in Baku arrested two journalists working for Sputnik Azerbaijan, the local affiliate of Russian state outlet Rossiya Segodnya, and said it would investigate the agency for illegal funding.

TBILISI: Georgia on Tuesday jailed prominent opposition figure Nika Gvaramia for eight months, the latest in a wave of arrests targeting politicians, activists, and journalists critical of the ruling party.
The EU candidate nation has been gripped by political unrest since the disputed parliamentary elections last October, when the ruling Georgian Dream party declared victory, sparking mass protests.
Demonstrators accuse the ruling party, which shelved EU membership talks, of veering toward authoritarian rule and steering the country closer to Moscow — accusations the government rejects.
On Tuesday, a Tbilisi court sentenced Gvaramia — the co-leader of the key opposition Akhali party — to eight months in prison and barred him from holding public office for two years, his lawyer Dito Sadzaglishvili told AFP.
“The verdict is unlawful and part of the government’s attempt to crush all dissent in Georgia,” he said.
Gvaramia was sentenced for refusing to cooperate with a parliamentary commission investigating alleged abuses under imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Nearly all of Georgia’s opposition leaders have been jailed this month on similar charges.
Saakashvili, a pro-Western reformer, is currently serving a 12-and-a-half-year prison term on charges widely denounced by rights groups as politically driven.
Opposition figures have rejected the commission’s legitimacy, accusing the ruling Georgian Dream party of using it as a tool to suppress dissent.
Amnesty International said last week that the “disputed” commission “has been instrumentalized to target former public officials for their principled opposition.”
Ahead of last year’s elections, Georgian Dream announced plans to outlaw all major opposition parties.
Brussels has said Georgia’s democratic backsliding derails it from its longstanding EU membership bid enshrined in the country’s constitution and supported — according to opinion polls — by some 80 percent of the population.
The United States and several European countries have imposed sanctions on some Georgian Dream officials.