Azernews.Az

By Fatima Hasanova

Azerbaijan's State Security Service (SSS) has arrested an illegal armed group, created under the control of the Iranian special services, Azernews reports, citing the SSS.

The State Security Service is conducting extensive investigations over cases in which the Iranian special services secretly attracted Azerbaijani citizens to military training outside the country, financed and directed their activities, and kept them in their zone of influence through blackmail and other violent methods in order to use them against interests of Azerbaijan's state security, the statement reads.

Operational and investigative measures established that the leadership of the illegal armed group, made up of Azerbaijani citizens under the control of Iranian special services through the use of radical extremist religious ideas, was entrusted to Tohid Ibrahimbayli, who is currently hiding in Iran, Asadov Rovshan, Mammadov Orkhan, Hajiyev Elshad (Akram Hajizada) and others, in respect of whom, since 2018, a preventive arrest for similar crimes has been chosen by the court and put on the international wanted list, the statement further added.

The SSS also said that those, who were selected for the illegal armed formation, are mainly from among previous convicts, as well as persons, who consider themselves members of an organization, called the Muslim Unity Movement, and they were transported through the territory of third countries to Iran's Tehran, where their mobile phones and passports were confiscated and were instructed on the secrecy of communications and secrecy requirements, were given religious nicknames and taken to the city of Damascus in Syria by military cargo planes using forged documents.

To recap, the SSS said it detained 19 Azerbaijani residents, who were found guilty of taking part in illegal armed group military training, and extremist video materials and literature that promoted banned religious extremist ideas were seized from them.

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