A German man sentenced to death in Belarus has appeared on state television in the country, in tears and begging the German government to intervene in his case.
“Mr Scholz, please, I am still alive … it is not yet too late,” said Rico Krieger, who was pictured handcuffed inside a cell, appealing to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
Authorities in Belarus, a dictatorial state where torture and politicised trials are rife, claim that Krieger, 30, travelled to the country last autumn on the orders of Ukrainian intelligence, with the goal of carrying out a terrorist attack on a railway line.
“This was the biggest mistake of my life. I admit my guilt, without a doubt,” said Krieger in a section of the interview where the original German was audible below a Russian-language voiceover translation. At several moments during the 17-minute television programme he broke down crying.
The KGB, as the Belarusian secret service is still known, has a record of falsifying evidence and extracting confessions under torture, casting doubt on the reliability of the claims made in the programme. No supporting evidence for Krieger’s supposed crimes was provided.
According to a LinkedIn profile, Krieger previously worked as a medical worker for the German Red Cross and as a security officer at the US embassy in Berlin. The German Red Cross confirmed he had worked there, and the German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel on Friday quoted a former colleague from the organisation saying Krieger had told them he had been recruited to travel to Ukraine. “We all assumed that he was going as a medic,” said the colleague.
Krieger said he had been motivated to work for Ukraine after reading about Russia’s war in the country on the news, and that his curators gave him a task to carry out in Belarus before he was due to travel to Ukraine. The programme claimed he took several photographs of sensitive locations and then planted a rucksack with explosives next to a railway track. The subsequent detonation did not hurt anyone, it was claimed.
Belarus is the only European country that retains capital punishment. Sentences are carried out by a single bullet to the back of the head; the remains are buried secretly in an unmarked grave.
It is possible that Belarus, a close ally of Russia, hopes to include Krieger in a prisoner exchange between Russia and the west that has been mooted for some months. The televised confession appeared to be designed to put pressure on the German government.
“Time is against me. At any moment they could carry out the sentence. Every second I regret what I did,” said Krieger, adding that he did not know why the German government was not making greater effort to intervene in his case.
Russia has jailed a number of US citizens, including the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, and President Vladimir Putin has signalled he is interested in a deal whereby Russian spies and assassins jailed abroad were returned to Moscow in exchange for western prisoners in Russia. However, Russia holds no high-profile German prisoners, and Putin has hinted that his prime target in an exchange is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who shot dead a Chechen exile in a Berlin park in 2019.
German officials have not commented on the swap rumours, but the German foreign ministry said earlier they were providing consular assistance to Krieger and “working intensively with Belarusian authorities on his behalf”.
On Friday, the German government spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann said Scholz was aware of the case. “Like the entire government, [he] is worried about these events, especially in connection with the death sentence,” she said at a press conference in Berlin.
