No, This Clip Doesn’t Show Azerbaijan PM ‘Acting Inappropriately’

The widely shared clip incorrectly identifies the man, who was an MP, as the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan.

The video shows Huseynbala Mirelemov, former MP of Azerbaijan.

(Photo: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

A video of Azerbaijani MP Huseynbala Mirelemov touching a woman’s back inappropriately is being shared to claim that it shows the country’s prime minister, who forgot to end a Zoom call before doing so.

Some users have shared the video with the claim that it is the President of Azerbaijan.

The incident occurred in April earlier this year and Mirelemov was fired from the New Azerbaijan Party and has since resigned from the university he taught at.

CLAIM

The clip claims that it shows Azerbaijan’s president inappropriately touching a woman.

The archived version of this claim can be found here.

The clip is shared with different claims on Facebook, identifying the man as the President or Prime Minister of Azerbaijan.

More such claims on Facebook and Twitter can be seen here, here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

Using InVID to extract frames from the video, we ran a reverse image search on the stills and found a video published on 21 April by a verified YouTube channel ‘BakuTV’, which identified the man as Huseynbala Mirelemov.

We looked up the man’s name and found a news report by BBC Azerbaijan, which revealed that Mirelemov was an MP belonging to the New Azerbaijan Party.

According to the report, the party terminated him after the video was shared on social media. Mirelemov was also a teacher at the Azerbaijan State University of Oil and Industry, from where he was expelled following his lewd behaviour.

In an interview to Unikal.org, Mirelemov alleged that he was blackmailed and the people who broadcast the video must be found.

The man in the video is neither the President nor the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan. Those positions are currently held by Ilham Aliyev and Ali Asadov.

President Ilham Aliyev (left) and Prime Minister Ali Asadov (right) of Azerbaijan.

Evidently, the video shows former Azerbaijani MP Huseynbala Mirelemov acting inappropriately and not the President or Prime Minister of the country.

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