Afghan TV journalist and activist Kobra Hassani, who fled her country after the Taliban returned to power in September 2021, left Moscow yesterday for Kabul, where she risks being sentenced to the death penalty, the Fontanka news site reported, citing sources from the Afghan diaspora in Russia . Hassani, who is 27 years old, initially landed in Ukraine, after crossing the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, but following the start of the Russian invasion she tried to move to Poland. Instead, she had been defrauded and taken to Russian-occupied territories and finally to Russia, after a tortuous journey. “They didn’t let me go to Europe, and they didn’t give me asylum in Russia”he had testified.
In Russia she was then arrested in St. Petersburg together with 12 other compatriots in May 2022 while trying to leave on charges of having tried to leave Russia illegally to enter a European Union country together with others as part of a plot. A year later a court ordered Hassani’s deportation. At the end of last year she submitted an asylum request, but in January the Russian authorities rejected her request. In February, she was sentenced to two years in prison. Given the time she also spent in prison awaiting trial, she was released, and the deportation order cancelled.
Yesterday he took a plane from Moscow to Kabul. He could have tried to seek asylum in other countries, such as Albania or Germany, but he had no money or energy, his lawyer said, Maria Beliaeva at the Moscow Times. The hypothesis of her lawyers, informed of the departure of their client from other Afghans in Russia, is that she no longer had the strength to remain in Russia and no longer had the confidence to actually be able to move to a third country. Russia is preparing to remove the Taliban from the list of terrorist organizations, the Tass agency announced last April, citing the efforts of the Foreign Ministry.
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