Azerbaijan Arrests Head of Independent Vote Monitor

Azerbaijani authorities have arrested the head of an independent election monitoring group after it criticized presidential polls that secured a new term for strongman Ilham Aliyev, one of his colleagues said Tuesday.

A Baku court on Monday ordered Anar Mammadli, chairman of the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center (EMDS), to spend three months in pre-trial detention in connection with an investigation into alleged tax evasion.

"We were summoned to the prosecutor's office as part of the investigation that was started in October," EMDS executive director Bashir Suleymanli told AFP.

"I was let go two hours later and then the state-appointed lawyer called to say that Anar Mammadli had been arrested," he said.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague -- in Baku on Tuesday for the signing ceremony of major deal that will see Azerbaijan export natural gas to Europe -- said he had raised the issue of Mammadli's arrest with Aliyev.

"I expressed my concern," Hague told reporters.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Morningstar said Washington was "deeply troubled" by the arrest and called for Mammadli's immediate release.

"The details of the charges are still unclear, but we must question whether Mr. Mammadli's detention is related to his organization’s election monitoring and reporting activities," Morningstar said in a statement.

Baku-based EMDS -- partially funded by Washington and the European Union -- reported numerous violations including ballot-stuffing at the October 9 presidential vote.

EMDS concluded that the poll "could not be considered free and democratic."

Aliyev secured a third term with some 85 percent of the vote to extend his family's decades-long grip on power in the tightly-controlled ex-Soviet state.

The government has lashed out at criticism by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that the vote was "seriously flawed".

The 51-year-old Aliyev took power in 2003 in a disputed election after the death of his father Heydar, a former KGB officer and Communist-era boss.

Any sign of dissent usually meets a harsh reaction in the oil-rich nation and rights groups have accused the authorities of continuing a ruthless crackdown on opponents that has seen scores of government critics jailed.