Azerbaijan: Frenchman sentenced to 10 years for spying

French citizen Martin Ryan pled guilty to some of the accusations that he was collecting intelligence on behalf of Paris.

An Azerbaijani court sentenced Martin Ryan of France to 10 years in prison on Monday, after finding him guilty of collecting secret information about Baku's military cooperation with Turkey and Pakistan.

He was also accused of cooperating with employees of France's security services allegeldy operating out of the French embassy in Baku.

Ryan had pled guilty to some, but not all, of the charges. His co-accused, Azerbaijani national Azad Mamedli, was sentenced to 12 years for treasion.

Azerbaijani authorities alleged Ryan recruited Mamedli and arranged for him to meet French intelligence agents.

While speaking in court, Ryan did not deny contacts with embassy officials but said he did not knowingly engage in espionage activities.

"I consider myself guilty only in that I should not have established contacts with some embassy employees, or that I should have shared information about them with the appropriate authorities," Ryan was cited by France's AFP news agency as saying. "I did not spy. I am not a spy, and during the court case I tried to prove this."

What are relations between Azerbaijan and France like?

The Frenchman was arrested during a period of heightened Paris-Baku tensions that have since eased. Both the tensions and the investigation in Ryan relate to the 44-day war in 2020 between Azerbaijan, Armenia, and ethnic Armenian separatists known as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

France was highly critical of Azerbaijan's conduct during the war, and adopted a staunchy pro-Armenian stance. Paris' position was also seen as an attempt to counter Turkish and Russian influence in the region. The western European country is also home to a large Armenian diaspora population.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have been accused of war crimes against civilians by organizations like Amnesty International.

Azerbaijan remains a strong ally of Russia's amidst its war in Ukraine, while France supports Kyiv.

Armenia is a traditional ally of Moscow but relations have soured in recent years.

Azerbaijan later took the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh — which is within Azerbaijan's internationally recognized borders but had been governed by Armenian separatists since a war in the 1990s — in a lightning offensive in September 2023, leading to the exodus of almost all of the territory's ethnic Armenian population.

Edited by: Saim Dušan Inayatullah