Supt. Emin Akhundov, 36: Azeri immigrant with long security career
Killed battling Hamas at the Supernova music festival on October 7
Supt. Emin Akhundov, 36, a squad commander in the Israel Police’s Yoav Unit, was killed on October 7 fighting the Hamas invasion of the Supernova music festival.
Emin was on duty as a police officer at the festival when the Hamas onslaught began. He told his wife via phone that they were trying to evacuate the large number of revelers after the party was shut down due to rocket fire. An hour later, around 7:30 a.m., he wrote to her that there was a terrorist invasion of southern Israel, and she should hunker down inside their home. After 8 a.m., his wife didn’t hear from him.
Fellow police officer Supt. Sergey Dyachuk told Ynet that as he was realizing the scale of the attack, he met up with Emin, and the pair decided that Sergey and other officers would head toward the highway while Emin and a group would go toward the forest. Both were met with enormous volleys of gunfire, he said, and before long, after Emin no longer answered, Sergey understood that he had been killed.
Emin was buried in Beersheba on October 8. He is survived by his wife, Luba, their children Daniel, 7, and Romi, 5, his parents, Galina and Ragim and his sister Sabina.
Born in Azerbaijan, he moved to Israel as a teenager as part of the Na’aleh young immigration program, settling in a dormitory in Kibbutz Shefayim, according to an Ofakim municipal eulogy.
After finishing high school, he enlisted as a lone soldier and served as a combat soldier in the Israeli Air Force and took part in fighting in the Second Lebanon War. Emin signed on to stay in the IDF past his mandatory service, eventually serving 10 years in the military, according to a eulogy from the Ashkelon Academic College, where he later received a bachelor’s degree in criminology.
After completing his time in the army, Emin joined the Israel Police in 2015, once again working his way up from the bottom and completing an officer’s course before taking on the role of squad commander in the Yoav Unit. At the same time, he also completed an MBA at Ben Gurion University and was slated to start another master’s degree at the university in emergency preparedness in October 2023.
He met his wife, Luba, when they were both high school students taking part in the Na’aleh program for immigrants without their parents. The couple settled in Beersheba, had two children, and moved in 2022 to Ofakim.
His comrades described him as a fair and supportive commander, devoted to his job who spent all of his free time with his family. He loved extreme sports and cars, his loved ones said, particularly bike riding and running.
Luba told Ynet that the period since his death “has been a roller coaster and a huge shock. I’m trying to be strong for the kids, to focus on the good and to preserve his memory — after all he wasn’t just killed, he was killed while protecting innocent people.”
She said she always knew there was some danger in his job, “but we never thought it would happen at an innocent festival… [Emin] wanted a job in the field, he didn’t want to sit in an office. We were in a good place, the kids were growing up a little and the house was blossoming. We took a spontaneous vacation together in Berlin.”
She said Emin was asked to work at the festival “because there weren’t any senior officers there for security. He didn’t want to go, but Emin was a responsible person — honest and decent — and he felt a responsibility to go.”
