Belarus pardons German man facing execution

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Tuesday pardoned a German man facing the death penalty, the country's state news agency reported.

Lukashenko "took the decision to pardon the German citizen Rico Krieger ... taking into account all the circumstances," Belta news agency reported, citing the president's press service.

Krieger, 30, had been shown on Belarusian public television last week, saying "I really hope that President [Alexander] Lukashenko will forgive me and pardon me," according to a statement quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.

He was convicted under six articles of Belarus' criminal code in a secretive trial held at the end of June, the Viasna Human Rights Centre reported.

Lukashenko held a meeting earlier Tuesday with the investigator in the case and Krieger's defense lawyer to discuss whether to apply the death penalty, his press service said.

"I've already said before that the hardest thing in the life of a president is such cases related to the death penalty," Lukashenko was quoted as saying at the meeting.

Krieger said on Belarusian television 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 U.S. embassy in Berlin.

German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Kathrin Deschauer said on Friday that "it is unfortunately common practice in Belarus to present people in videos or on television like this, and we are of course very concerned that being paraded in this way massively violates that person's dignity."

"We can only appeal to the Belarusian leadership to stop this practice," Deschauer told reporters.

"We have been providing the detainee in question with consular services and are very concerned about his case," Deschauer said, adding that "we as a government fundamentally reject the death penalty 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.

The country is run as an authoritarian regime by longtime leader Lukashenko, who has detained thousands of dissidents and civic activists who oppose him.

Source: Agence France-Presse, Staff, July 30, 2024

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