YEREVAN. – The claims that Armenia has not petitioned to Belarus regarding blogger Alexander Lapshin, are untrue, Armenia's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tigran Balayan told Armenian News–NEWS.am.

“We have repeatedly petitioned to Belarus regarding Lapshin at the different levels,” Balayan noted.

Earlier this week Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated that Armenia had never said anything about Lapshin: “Do you remember Lapshin? Listen, what does Armenia have to do with it? And Armenia never said anything about Lapshin. He was wanted by a country: Azerbaijan. When they detained him here [in Belarus], I thought why did they detain him here; let him go where it’s needed. But they detained him; the Interpol knew [about it]. We informed, according to procedure, as non-breakers of the law. To whom had we hand him over? To whoever had declared him wanted.”

After his visits to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2011 and 2012, Israeli Russian blogger and journalist Alexander Lapshin was “blacklisted” by Azerbaijan.

In June 2016, however, he paid a visit to Azerbaijan--but with a Ukrainian passport--and, subsequently, he published several articles criticizing the Azerbaijani authorities.

Afterward, Azerbaijan issued an international search for this famous blogger. On December 15, 2016, Lapshin was detained in the Belarusian capital city of Minsk, and based on this search.

On January 26 of the current year, the Minsk city court dismissed the blogger's appeal of the Belarusian General Prosecutor's Office decision to extradite him to Azerbaijan.

On February 7, the Supreme Court of Belarus dismissed the appeals that were filed into this case, and upheld the aforesaid decision by the General Prosecutor’s Office.

And on the evening of the same day, Belarus extradited Alexander Lapshin to the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku, where he was taken into custody.