A 44-year-old Azerbaijani national with a British passport, charged with espionage and terrorism offences in Cyprus, has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that secret intelligence from an unidentified foreign service was used to detain him without ever being disclosed to him or scrutinised by a court.
The application, filed through his lawyer Efstathios Efstathiou, has been registered and assigned a case number at the ECHR. The case has already attracted attention from British authorities, who submitted a request via Eurojust for a joint investigation team to be established.
The man was arrested in Limassol on 21 June last year on the basis of a tip-off from a cooperating foreign intelligence service. He faces felony charges of terrorism and espionage at Limassol Criminal Court, with prosecutors alleging he photographed the Andreas Papandreou Air Base in Paphos and the British Bases at Akrotiri, maintained contacts with members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), held information about military installations in Cyprus and was planning a terrorist attack.
The ECHR application rests on the argument that the intelligence underpinning his arrest was never disclosed — either to him or to the courts that handled his detention. The application states that when police sought his remand, they cited classified information from a foreign service indicating he had IRGC contacts, held military intelligence and was planning an attack.
His lawyer argues the origin of that intelligence was never established, it was not clarified whether it came from an EU member state or a third country, and no evidence was produced to show its collection, processing and transmission were lawful.
Police contended that the intelligence was corroborated by physical surveillance of his activities. His lawyer characterises those activities as ordinary and unremarkable.
Efstathiou also attempted to exhaust domestic remedies before turning to the ECHR. An application to the Supreme Court for a certiorari order was rejected without the court examining the origin or legality of the intelligence. An appeal requesting the Supreme Court to refer a preliminary question to the Court of Justice of the EU on the compatibility of detention orders based on unverified intelligence from an unknown foreign service was also rejected, with no reference to the CJEU request in the ruling. The ECHR application cites six points alleging violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The case sits within a broader pattern of IRGC-linked cases investigated by Cypriot authorities. A 28-year-old Azerbaijani and a 27-year-old Estonian arrested on 26 February were initially linked to the 44-year-old after police cited secret intelligence suggesting the two Azerbaijanis shared the same Iranian handler. Both were subsequently deported. In a separate case, Orhan Asadov, 42, was arrested in September 2021 at a Nicosia swimming pool on terrorism charges for allegedly planning the assassination of five Israeli nationals. He was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on 21 November 2025 and subsequently repatriated.
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