Azeri reporter sentenced to four years in jail

BAKU, March 7 (Reuters) - A court in Azerbaijan, under fire from the West for its treatment of the media, has sentenced a senior journalist and government critic to four years in jail for hooliganism, his colleagues said on Friday.

Ganimat Zahid, editor-in-chief of the Azadlyq (Freedom) paper, said the charges against him were "absurd and fabricated" after an Azeri court read out the verdict on Thursday, one of his paper's reporters present at the trial said.

Another fellow journalist said authorities had deliberately provoked Zahid into engaging in a fist fight with a colleague to defend a woman who had been insulted. No further details of the incident were immediately available.

Last December, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree pardoning six journalists whose imprisonment was attacked by Western diplomats and human rights bodies. But three other journalists who were critical of the government remain in jail.

Ex-Soviet Azerbaijan, where Aliyev succeeded his father as leader, is fast becoming an important oil supply route to the West and foreign oil barons have pumped in billions of dollars to develop the Caucasus nation's oil output.

But the tough treatment of the media has drawn criticism from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (Reporting by Lada Yevgrashina; writing by Dmitry Solovyov)