Blogger Lapshin departs from Azerbaijan to Israel

Russian-Israeli travel blogger Alexander Lapshin, who was arrested and jailed in Azerbaijan, has left the country, TASS reports, citing APA news agency.

"On September 14, Alexander Lapshin departed from Baku to Tel Aviv accompanied by his mother," the agency said.

Earlier on 11 September, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev signed an order pardoning the blogger.

To remind, Lapshin was sentenced by the Baku Court on Grave Crimes on July 20, 2017 over his visit to Nagorno-Karabakh.

The blogger was detained in the Belarusian capital of Minsk in December 2016 at Baku’s request. He was flown to Baku on February 7 and handed over to the Azerbaijani State Security Service.

Azerbaijani prosecutors launched a criminal case into “repeated public anti-state calls” and what they claimed as “illegal crossing of Azerbaijan’s state border.”

The extradition and persecution against Lapshin was widely slammed by international community as a gross violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of speech and movement.