Azernews.Az

Prosecutor-General Zakir Garalov has rebuffed allegations made by a former senior Interior Ministry official during the trial of a 26-people strong gang responsible for numerous killings and kidnappings in Azerbaijan in the past 10 years.
"No one can put forth grave accusations against me," he said.
Former head of the ministry's senior crime search department, Zakir Nasirov, had said that Garalov allegedly harbored ring leader Haji Mammadov. The prosecutor-general, in turn, said all the criminal cases dealing with abductions had been vested in a single investigative group and undertaken by the Prosecutor-General's Office on his own initiative.
"It was on my initiative that those persons [ring members] were arrested."
The criminal group of the former operations chief of the ministry's senior crime search department, Haji Mammadov, was neutralized in the "Black belt" operation in March 2005. Mammadov and nine other leaders of the notorious gang were sentenced to life imprisonment in January after an intensely-watched trial that lasted a year and half. The other defendants were handed down jail terms ranging between eight and 15 years. The defense subsequently appealed the ruling. In late November, the Court of Appeal upheld the verdict.
Commenting on Zakir Nasirov's statement that he was aware of facts concerning the murder of the editor of controversial Monitor magazine Elmar Huseynov, Garalov said that anyone who had facts regarding the case could appeal to law enforcement agencies in writing.
"When the journalist was killed, Zakir Nasirov held his post, and disclosing the crime was his professional duty," the top prosecutor said.
At the same time, Garalov said the Prosecutor-General's Office was still ready to receive this information from Nasirov.
The magazine editor was gunned down at the entrance of his apartment in March 2005. Monitor published political, economic and social articles as well as investigative pieces exposing official corruption and mismanagement.