Pro-Palestinian pogrom leaves 12 Jews injured in Azeri City

Twelve Jews were taken to hospital, some with knife wounds, and their homes looted in several revenge attacks for Israel’s Gaza operation in the Azerbaijani town of Sumagait Monday night, Feb. 9. The next day, the Sumgait governor Vagif Aliyev called an extraordinary meeting with national security agents and ordered to find and punish the perpetrators.
Samagait, the third largest Azeri town after Baku and Ganzja, recently was declared a free economic zone in order to draw much needed foreign investment. It authorities have clamped a blackout on the incidents.
Anti-Semitic violence dates back to 2006, when the Imam of the town’s Juma mosque Ilgar Ibragimoglu threatened the head of Azerbaijan’s Jewish community, which supported Israel’s offensive against Hizballah, with reprisals to “demonstrate our solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese.”
debkafile‘s counter-terror source report that Azerbaijan’s population is 70 percent Shiite Muslim and 30 percent Sunni – the reverse proportion of most parts of Central Asia. Targeted by Tehran as a potential sphere of influence, Baku is heavily infiltrated by Iranian undercover agents and clerics.
Located about 30 miles away from Baku on the northern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, Sumgait has a population of 300,000.
In February, 1988, rampaging Muslims carried out what became know as the Sumgait Massacre against the Armenian population.