AHMAD MUKHTAR
Freelance journalist and peace activist
About Ahmad Mukhtar
Ahmad Mukhtar is a peace activist and freelance photojournalist from Azerbaijan. He was born on 25 June 1985 in Magsudlu village of the Aghdam region. Later, he graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Baku State University.He has worked for a number of media outlets, where he wrote about a wide range of topics, including labour rights, urban development issues, and cultural topics such as the history of meykhana performers.
As an Internally Displaced Person (IDP), his reporting on the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War was very personal. He was born and raised in the village of Magsudlu, which is near Aghdam. When he was eight years old, his family had to leave during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1993. He wrote about how the war affected civilians in Azerbaijan, including the destruction in cities such as Barda and Ganja. Since then, he has been involved in peacebuilding projects and has said publicly that both Azerbaijani and Armenian societies need to accept the human cost of the conflict and start thinking about how to live together.In December 2024, he was arrested under administrative charges and sentenced to 20 days of administrative arrest for hooliganism and disobeying police. He was then released without any further charges. At the same time, pro-government media accused him of smuggling Western donor money with other journalists who had been arrested earlier in the Meydan TV case.
Case description
On 27 August 2025, police in Baku arrested Ahmad Mukhtar again. This arrest made him the twelfth person to be arrested in the criminal case against the independent news outlet Meydan TV, which authorities say is involved in smuggling and illegally receiving money from Western donors. On the second day, the Khatai District Court remanded him to pre-trial detention for forty days. In his case, authorities appointed a state-appointed lawyer.At the same time as his arrest, the final report on the Meydan TV case was made public, and the charges against the group of detained journalists were made much more serious. Mukhtar was charged with allegedly committing eight crimes, including illegal entrepreneurship by an organised group (Articles 192.2.2 and 192.2.3), legalisation of property obtained through crime (Articles 193-1.3.1 and 193-1.3.2), smuggling committed by an organised group (Article 206.4), tax evasion committed by an organised group (Article 213.2.1), and forgery of documents (Articles 320.1 and 320.2). If convicted, he may face up to twelve years in prison.Currently, Mukhtar is held in the pre-trial detention centre pending trial.In December 2025, the criminal case against Mukhtar was sent to the Baku Court for Serious (Grave) Crimes, and trials began in mid-December 2025.1,2,3
References
Resources about Ahmad Mukhtar
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