Here Azerbaijan gets quiet on the BBC: “Let's talk about Assange”

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Published 8 May 2021 at 12.49

Abroad. A video from 2020 is now going viral online, where Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev silences a journalist who accuses him of cracking down on free media in the country, reports Samnytt.

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It was supposed to be a regular PK feature where the British state TV giant journalist Orla Guerin would sit and teach freedom of the press and human rights to an authoritarian leader in the third world.

< But when Guerin accused Aliyev of not allowing any free media, the interview took a quick turn.

“The proportion of Internet users in Azerbaijan is 80 percent. a country where the internet is freely available and uncensored, and 80 percent use it? ” asked the president.

When Ilham Aliyev received no sensible answers from the BBC, he continued:

“Let's talk about Assange. How many years has he spent at the Ecuadorian embassy? And for what “And where is he today? You have kept him imprisoned, killed him in a moral and physical sense, because of his journalistic deed. That's what you did, not us,” said Aliyev.

Assange spent seven years at the embassy in London to avoid arrest on behalf of Sweden, which formally suspected him of sex crimes. When that investigation was closed, however, it turned out that the United States hid in the background with its own extradition request against Assange, and after Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum status, he was transferred to a British high-security prison pending extradition. He is still there.

In the United States, Assange is suspected of having published less flattering information about the superpower's behavior during, among other things, the war in Iraq