NEWS: GERMAN MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH N BELARUS APPEARS ON TV TO BEG FOR PARDON
Read Time:1 Minute, 23 Second
Agency Report
A German man who was given a death sentence by a Belarusian court made an appearance on television on Thursday to request a pardon.
Following a covert trial at the end of June, Rico Krieger, 30, was found guilty under six provisions of Belarus’s penal code, according to the Viasna Human Rights Center.
“I really hope that President (Alexander) Lukashenko will forgive me and pardon me,” the German national told Belarusian public television, according to a statement quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.
He said that he had been asked by Ukraine to photograph military sites in Belarus in October 2023 and that he had placed an explosive device on a railway line near Minsk under their orders.
“I deeply regret what I did and I am relieved that there were no victims,” he said, adding that he had been “abandoned” by the German government.
According to a LinkedIn profile that Viasna said belonged to Krieger, he worked as a medic for the German Red Cross and had previously been employed as an armed security officer for the US embassy in Berlin.
A source at the German Foreign Ministry told AFP last week that it and the embassy in Minsk were “providing the person in question with consular services and are making intensive representations to the Belarusian authorities on his behalf.”
The source added that “the death penalty is a cruel and inhuman form of punishment that Germany rejects under all circumstances”.
Belarus is reported to have executed as many as 400 people since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, according to Amnesty International, but executions of foreign citizens are rare.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0