The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's statement, calling it provocative and a distortion of historical facts. Speaking on the anniversary of the 1915 events, Mamdani linked the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to modern-day events, accusing Azerbaijan and Turkey of attacking Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and "expelling" more than 100,000 people in 2023.
In the fall of 2023, the Supreme Court of the KBR sentenced Salikh Osmanov, a resident of Kabardino-Balkaria, to 9 years in a maximum security colony. He was found guilty of preparing sabotage, as well as of having a negative attitude towards the SVO and the authorities of the Russian Federation. The man did not admit guilt, claiming falsification of the case and pressure on him.
One of the evidence was correspondence on a phone that allegedly belonged to the accused. In the correspondence, according to the prosecution, the man expressed a negative attitude towards the war in Ukraine. Salih Osmanov does not admit guilt and claims that security forces planted a phone on him during a search.
Salih's defense asked that the phone be sent for examination to any Ministry of Justice institution outside the KBR. But the judge decided to conduct an examination at the Forensic Expert Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the CBD. The lawyers sent the results of the examination for review to the Research Institute of Forensic Expertise "Gost Expert". They pointed out gross violations committed in the first study. For example, it turned out that the expert of the Ministry of Internal Affairs could not answer 8 out of 12 questions from the judicial panel and made a conclusion without relying on facts that could be verified.
According to investigators, Salikh Osmanov and two accomplices were preparing sabotage near the railway bridge over the canal. Lenin in Prokhladnensky district. All three adhered to radical movements of Islam and had a negative attitude towards Russian government authorities, law enforcement officers and the “special military operation” in Ukraine.