BAKU - A dissident leader recently released from prison died under mysterious circumstances during a crackdown on the Azerbaijan opposition involving 29 arrests in two days, opposition parties said Thursday.
Ehtiram Jalilov, 35, deputy head of Azerbaijan's National Democratic Party, became the second opposition activist to die in unexplained circumstances this year, an allied opposition party, Musavat (Equality), said.
Jalilov was sipping tea with a colleague on Wednesday when he slumped dead at the table, according to Qabil Huseynli, deputy head of Musavat, one of the former Soviet republic's best known opposition parties.
In February, a 21-year-old Musavat activist died under similar circumstances.
Huseynli called for the creation of an international panel of doctors to investigate the deaths, saying that medics the party has consulted believe "the deaths could have been caused by an unknown powder used by the special services against undesirables."
Twenty nine opposition activists, 18 of them Musavat party members, have been arrested over the past two days for minor infractions such as disturbing the peace and resisting arrest ahead of an anti-government rally planned for Saturday, Huseynli said.
"We think this has to do with the protest. The authorities are concerned that it will be huge and are arresting those people they think are responsible for its organization," Huseynli said.
Late Thursday police also arrested Razi Nurullayev, the leader of Yokh, a burgeoning youth protest movement modeled on those that recently helped topple entrenched regimes in Georgia and Ukraine, a member said.
A police officer came to Nurullayev's home and invited him out to a nearby teahouse for a chat, "the next thing we heard was that he was arrested and would be in custody for the next few days," the Yokh member said on condition of anonymity.
The Yeni Fikir youth movement said some of its members had been arrested and released with warnings not to attend the rally.
A police spokesman told AFP he had no information concerning the reported arrests.
Baku authorities refused to allow the rally earlier in the week citing concerns that it fell too close to the day on which the government plans an opening ceremony for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, an event due to be attended by many foreign dignitaries.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) expressed its concern over the city's decision on Thursday.
"The OSCE Office in Baku hopes that the right to freedom of assembly will be immediately restored, not only in connection with the November parliamentary elections, but as a fundamental political right of citizens," it said.
Musavat and other opposition groups vowed to go ahead with the rally whether it was authorized or not and top opposition leaders met late Thursday to coordinate their plans, said Ali Kerimli, head of the opposition National Front party.
Tensions between the authorities and the opposition have been heating up ahead of a parliamentary vote in November.
The Azeri authorities have not authorized any opposition protests since the presidential elections in 2003, when protests that turned into riots resulted in the arrest of hundreds of opposition activists.
Most were released almost immediately, but 40 protesters who were serving lengthy sentences were only amnestied in April of this year under pressure from Europe's top human rights body, the Council of Europe.
Their jailing followed much-criticized trials that were marred by accusations of torture.
The Council of Europe recently said it was "deeply concerned by the general political climate in the country."
"Some of the basic pre-conditions for holding free and fair elections -- freedom of expression and the right to hold peaceful meetings -- are not met," it said.
It said that November's elections would be a fork in the road where "we may become witnesses either to fair and free elections or a bloody confrontation between thousands."

05/19/2005 19:22 GMT