Elvin Zeynalov, a religious activist who lives in the village of Mashtaga on the Absheron Peninsula, worked day labor and used part of his earnings to provide financial assistance to the families of those arrested. At noon on January 31, 2025, he was detained by plainclothes men in front of a store near his home. According to his family, in the late afternoon, men in black brought Elvin Zeynalov home and searched it. They took his trousers from his closet, put marijuana in his pocket, then "confiscated" the drugs and filmed a video before taking the activist away.
That same day, security forces returned him home and searched his home, announcing they had found marijuana. Zeynalov was then taken away again. Zeynalov's sister reported that security forces placed something in her brother's pants pocket before claiming they found drugs.
In an attempt to find out Elvin Zeynalov's whereabouts, relatives contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ombudsman's Office. Only on February 1st were their inquiries successful. As Taran Zeynalov's sister recounted,

"Late in the evening, we finally received official confirmation that Elvin was being held at the Ministry of Internal Affairs' Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime. He was accused of a drug-related crime. This is a blatant lie."

At the end of 2022, Azerbaijani-Iranian relations deteriorated once again. This again impacted the Muslim Unity Movement (MUM). It should be noted that MUE Chairman Tale Bagirzade was arrested in 2015 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017. He has been imprisoned for seven years in the Gobustan Closed Prison and is recognized as a political prisoner. Ten other MUE members were also sentenced to lengthy prison terms at the same time. And now, in November-December 2022, four more MUE members were arrested on the now-standard drug possession charges. But the main blow fellin late January-early February 2023, when a total of 44 MUE members were arrested. Eight of them were charged with criminal offenses, again for the purchase and possession of drugs, while the rest were given administrative sentences of 10 to 30 days in prison for "resisting the police." However, the authorities of Azerbaijan did not stop there. In March and April, the second and most widespread campaign of arrests and detentions of believers began. Arrests occurred almost daily. These figures illustrate the scale of the repressions: in March and April, we were able to gather reliable information about the arrests of 82 believers. In addition, we had information about the arrests of another 93 believers, but this information is incomplete and requires clarification. In total, by mid-April 2023, we had collected information about the arrests of 175 believers in March and April 2023. In addition, we had information about the arrests of approximately 200 more believers in the provinces, bringing the total number of believers arrested to over 370. Furthermore, there are reports of up to 40 believers emigrating from the country, primarily to Russia and other European countries.
But the arrests of believers did not end there. In May 2023, another wave of repression against believers occurred, and in late June and early July, another campaign of persecution against Shia believers was reported. In September, another wave of arrests of religious believers swept across the country. It is noteworthy that among those arrested were both representatives of the country's civil society and religious believers.

In Karabakh, however, while the civil society activists were given administrative punishment in the form of 30 days' imprisonment for hooliganism, law enforcement agencies treated the religious opponents of the war more harshly – all were arrested on drug possession charges, the standard charge this year.

In total, 535 Shia believers were arrested in Azerbaijan from late January to mid-December 2023.
An interesting detail: government propaganda labeled all those arrested as "agents of Iran," however, their arrests were carried out not by the State Security Service, which handles such cases, but by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Moreover, all the Shias were arrested as "drug addicts," and their records make no mention of Iran. The situation with Shiites has not changed, and it remains the same in 2024. Arrests of Shiites as "agents of Iran" continued constantly, with particularly large numbers in the country's second city, Ganja, and in the south. In total, approximately 140 were arrested in 2024.