Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev did not possess any legal right to pardon the Armenian officer’s murderer Ramil Safarov, an Azeri expert says.

According to professor Khanlar Alikperov, whose comments appeared on Contact.az website, in compliance with the article 82.3 of Azerbaijan’s criminal code, life sentence can be replaced by a 25-year prison term only.

“Thus, President Aliyev did not have the right to pardon a person who had been sentenced to life. The best what he could do for the convict is to cut the service term to 25 years,” Alikperov says.