Alexander Lukashenko pardoned Rico Krieger, a German citizen and employee of the German Red Cross, sentenced to death, Pool First reported.
Today, July 30, it became known that Krieger wrote a petition for pardon. In June, the Minsk Regional Court sentenced him to death. Krieger was accused of illegal actions regarding firearms weapons, damaging transport or communication routes, creation of or participation in an «extremist» formation, committing a terrorist act, Article 358-1 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus > and mercenarism.
As Mediazona. Belarus explains, Krieger was sentenced to death on the basis of terrorism charges — the explosion at the Ozerishche railway station in the suburbs of Minsk. This is the only article that provides for capital punishment.An employee of the SB. Belarus Segodnya newspaper, Lyudmila Gladkaya, citing court documents, wrote that the foreigner entered Belarus as a tourist in the fall of 2023 and brought with him “phones and a drone.”
Before this, Krieger, according to investigators, sent requests to Ukrainian sites, “including the site Western grouping«, which was one of the battalions of the Kastus Kalinowski regiment. In this way, Krieger allegedly contacted the SBU officer and began to carry out his tasks.
Krieger was born in Berlin and is 30 years old. He lived in the city of Hildesheim and has a wife and a minor child. According to his LinkedIn page, he worked for three years in the US State Department security service in Berlin since 2014, then as a nurse, and then as a paramedic in the German Red Cross.
The German Foreign Ministry and the embassy in Minsk provide Rico Krieger with consular assistance. On July 20, the press secretary of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, Anatoly Glaz, wrote on Facebook that the Belarusian side proposed «specific solutions for the available options for the development of the situation.»
On July 25, the state channel Belarus 1 published a story called «Confession of a German Terrorist,» in which Krieger, sitting behind bars, says that a year ago he decided to go to Ukraine and get a job as a paramedic in a foreign legion.
In the video, he speaks German, and his speech is translated into Russian by a voiceover. Krieger reports that «the German government did not help him in any way.» At the end of the video, the words are heard: «I deeply regret what I did. Every minute and every second. It makes me feel a little better that there were no victims. I really hope that President Alexander Lukashenko will forgive me and pardon me.»