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Blogger Alexander Lapshin, who was arrested and jailed in Azerbaijan, has left the country.

Lapshin has left for Israel, together with his mother Bella Lapshina, on board a flight from the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku to Tel Aviv, reported APA news agency of Azerbaijan.

After his visits to Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) in 2011 and 2012, blogger and journalist Alexander Lapshin—who is a citizen of Russia, Israel, and Ukraine—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.

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

And a court in Baku sentenced him to three years in prison.

But Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev on Monday signed a decree on pardoning Alexander Lapshin.

At the same time, however, it became known that he had almost committed suicide in prison.

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