Revealing photographs of journalists and activists are proliferating on social media. Many Azerbaijanis, and the women themselves, suspect they were planted by the country’s authoritarian government as revenge against speaking out, OCCRP recent
report shows. The government denies the claims.
In mid-February, Azerbaijani activist Bakhtiyar Hajiyev escalated a month-long hunger strike to protest his detention, announcing he would no longer even drink water.
Over the next few weeks, a series of channels promising the “exposure of Bakhtiyar” began appearing on the social media app Telegram. They seemed designed to embarrass Hajiyev by spreading a trove of material stolen from his personal phone, including photographs, chats, and audio recordings of sexual encounters.
The posts, which were shared with thousands of readers, also exposed a series of women he had been in contact with over the past seven years, many of them activists and journalists themselves.
Several of the women were shown in compromising positions or nude. Others were “exposed” for just posing next to Hajiyev in public. Some of the Telegram channels dredged up old hacked images of women who had simply expressed support for the activist, or dissent from the government. Many of the posts revealed the women’s home addresses or contact information alongside intimate conversations and lewd captions.
Azerbaijan was also outed as a major user of Pegasus spyware in the Pegasus Project, a 2021 collaborative journalism project coordinated by Forbidden Stories.
While reporting on the project, OCCRP found Azerbaijan’s government had selected more than 40 activists, journalists, and their family members — including Hajiyev — to target with the spyware. Pegasus can gain full access to a mark’s phone and be used to read text messages, access photographs and passwords, and even make secret recordings.
