On June 26, a 20-year-old citizen of Azerbaijan was found dead in a rented apartment in the Varketili district of Tbilisi. The young woman is presumed to have been murdered. The main suspect is her cousin, who has already been detained in Turkey and, at the time of this recording, is being prepared for extradition to Georgia. Three countries have found themselves entangled in this tragedy, which exposes a value system where family “honor” is sometimes deemed more important than human life.
The story was brought to light by Georgian human rights activists, specifically Baia Pataraia, the head of the Sapari organization. Sapari is now seeking to represent the victim’s sister in court.
In mid-May, Fatima Karimova fled to Tbilisi with her boyfriend, Kanan Aliyev, because her family back home wanted to marry her off to someone else. They ran out of money almost immediately, jobs were impossible to find, and the boyfriend began systematically abusing her. He pawned her phone, tore up her passport, and then simply returned to Baku, leaving Fatima alone in a foreign country without documents or any means of survival.
A stranger, Tbilisi resident Inna Mkrtchyan, came to the young woman’s aid. She recalls seeing cigarette burns on Fatima’s arms; the girl admitted her boyfriend had inflicted them. Fatima had no phone, only a piece of paper with the phone numbers of several relatives. That was when she contacted her cousin, Emin Aliyev. To avoid confusion, Emin Aliyev and Kanan Aliyev merely share a last name and are not related.
Emin arrived in Tbilisi in early June. He settled his cousin in a rented apartment in a residential neighborhood, promising to take her back home once their relatives calmed down. Notably, Fatima was an orphan; her uncles made all the decisions regarding her life.
When the young woman stopped answering calls from her only sister in late June, the sister grew worried and asked Inna Mkrtchyan to check the apartment. When no one answered the door, Mkrtchyan called the police. After breaking down the door, law enforcement officers discovered the young woman’s body. Neighbors later admitted they had heard noise and screams during the night.
According to investigators, Fatima fell victim to a so-called “honor killing.” Her boyfriend, who had abandoned her in Tbilisi, had been blackmailing her with intimate videos. The victim’s sister does not rule out that their uncles found out about this and ordered Emin Aliyev to kill Fatima. It is also known that the cousin had abused, insulted, and threatened her with a knife.
While this may seem barbaric to many, such crimes still occur in several traditional societies. An “honor killing” is the murder of a person by their own relatives to restore an allegedly tarnished family reputation. Most often, the victims are women whose behavior is deemed a violation of patriarchal norms: refusing an arranged marriage, entering a relationship without family consent, leaving home independently, or simply being suspected of “inappropriate” conduct. The defining characteristic of such crimes is that the danger comes not from a stranger, but from one’s own family.
No official statistics on “honor killings” are kept in Azerbaijan. At the same time, hundreds and thousands of domestic violence crimes are recorded in the country every year. According to official data, over 80 percent of the victims are women.
The story of Fatima Karimova is more than just the story of a single crime. It demonstrates that even when a woman manages to escape, she cannot always hide from violence if the source of danger is her own family. Human rights defenders emphasize that this problem has long transcended national borders. Geographical boundaries and relocation do not stop domestic violence as long as conservative societies maintain a code of silence and justify vigilante justice.
