The Baku Court of Grave Crimes on Wednesday continued the trial in the case into blogger Alexander Lapshin, who is under arrest in Azerbaijan.
Judicial investigation of this case has been completed, reported APA news agency of the country.
The state prosecutor asked to court for time to make a statement.
The trial will resume on Friday.
After his visits to Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) in 2011 and 2012, blogger and journalist Alexander Lapshin—who is a citizen of Russia, Israel, and several other countries—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.
