Alexander Lapshin, who is recently released from an Azerbaijani prison and has gone to Israel, made several posts on his Facebook page, and, as expected, they refute the Azerbaijani allegation of his attempting to commit suicide while in prison.
“If we leave aside the events in the early morning hours on September 10, when they beat me and staged a suicide attempt to have a formal occasion for a pardon as if ‘we are good-hearted men,’ I experienced disgust and fear on April 3, 2017. At the Baku prison cell, I was hearing all night the ‘Allahu Achbar’ [the Azerbaijani version of “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest,” in Arabic)] ‘joyous cheer’ coming from the other cells. The occasion of the ‘joy’ was the bloody terrorism in the Saint Petersburg [Russia] subway, which claimed the lives of 16 people.
“Azerbaijani prisons are full of radical Islamists. And there are more Islamists in freedom, and they even wear shoulder straps waiting for their hour.
“Moreover, Baku authorities fanatically refute the Shiite radical Islam’s impact, which is growing in the country. I’ve seen all this with my own eyes, and I personally followed the Islamists. They’re everywhere, and they permit many of them to freely move about in the prison,” the blogger wrote, in particular, in one of his posts.
And in another post, Lapshin specifically wrote as follows: “There is a view that Azerbaijan can’t be forgiven for the attempt to kill me, and there is a need to act literately and with international instances. I believe in the international law experts, and I’m collecting [respective] documents; I’ll inform [about it] later.
“I read my ‘regret,’ which is a fake, with great interest. Do they seriously suppose that I could have written something and ask for forgiveness while lying at the intensive care unit, with injuries?”
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 he spent solely nine months in places of detention.
Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev on Monday signed a decree on pardoning Alexander Lapshin.
On the same day, however, it became known that he had attempted to commit suicide in prison.
Alexander Lapshin left Azerbaijan on Thursday.
