A man who had been imprisoned in Estonia for 38 years has finally been released.
Oleg Pjatnitski, now 61, was originally apprehended for the relatively minor crime of theft, but this soon snowballed as he added murder and other serious crimes to the list, ultimately ending up on death row. While the death penalty was commuted – the death penalty abolished in Estonia in the 1990s – Pjatnitski, as with many others who had escaped the executioner in a similar way – remained in jail.
He was released from Tartu prison on Friday, following a judgment last month which overruled a lower-tier court's decision to continue to keep him behind bars.