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The U.S. Department of Justice will waive the death penalty The case of Craig Lang, An Army veteran who fought in Ukraine with a far-right paramilitary unit and authorities have reportedly killed a couple in southwest Florida in April 2018.
U.S. officials and experts studying the far-right are watching the case closely, with Americans increasingly moving to Ukraine to train with far-right militant groups and gain experience in fighting.
In a statement on Fort Myers Zoom on Monday, Assistant Attorney General of the Central District of Jesus Jesus Casas told the court that the government has decided to suspend the sentence in hopes of speeding Lang’s extradition from Kyiv. has limited house arrest.
Ukraine is sensitive about the capital punishment it abolished in 2000. Lang and his lawyers have been questioning the European Court of Human Rights, which has ordered Lang to be extradited until his case is examined. A GEDB spokesman did not say when the review would end.
Casas said in a hearing on Monday that the U.S. government would still demand the death penalty from Lang Zonsenper, Alex Zwiefelhofer, an army veteran who fought alongside far-right extremists in eastern Ukraine and has been in U.S. custody since 2019.
Lang, 30 and 23-year-old Zwiefelhofer, is accused of using a fake person to lure Serafin “Danny” Lorenzo and Deana Lorenzo to a night meeting at a business complex in the town of Estero, where the couple expected to buy firearms. men and sell them for profit. Instead, Lang and Zwiefelhofer allegedly murdered the Lorenzos dramatically attack, let him die and stole $ 3,000.
After the couple died, the ex-soldiers planned to flee the money by boat to Yacht America, where they wanted to “take part in the armed conflict against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and kill “communists.” The escape did not go as planned, however, and Zwiefelhofer was later captured in his home in Wisconsin and taken to Florida, where he is awaiting trial in December. Lang managed to return to Ukraine, but was eventually arrested Ukrainian authorities in August 2019, After returning from a short trip to Moldova. Border guards stopped him after seeing that they had issued an Interpol arrest warrant.
In a text message, Lang’s chief lawyer in Ukraine, Dmytro Morhun, declined on Monday about the new development.
A relative of the Lorenzo family told BuzzFeed News on Monday that they are happy with the development. In April, relatives, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety, said they did not want the death penalty for Lang; they just want to go back to Florida for trial. “We just want to pay,” the relatives said.
Bjorn Brunvand, Lang appointed by U.S. court Lang, told Judge Sheri Polster Chappell that he has made “inquiries” about Lang’s possible extradition, but does not yet know when Lang will be in U.S. custody.
Seeing the uncertainty surrounding Lang’s situation, Casas told Judge Chappell that the government is following the Zwiefelhofer case in a different direction.
Lang, and Zwiefelhofer’s government lawyers admitted that the pandemic had slowed down the process of gathering the things needed to prepare for the trial. Zwiefelhofer’s attorney, D. Todd Doss, said he needed more time to travel to meet with witnesses and gather documents in defense of his client.
Lang and Zwiefelhofer first met in Ukraine in 2016 when they joined the far-right far-right group. Its well known new Nazi members and alleged human rights violations, Emerged from an alliance of right-wing militant groups formed in the 2014 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. The Right Sector was later renewed as a battalion to fight voluntarily, with Russia taking over Crimea and starting a war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Other Americans fought in Ukraine he told BuzzFeed News in conversations, Lang and Zwiefelhofer became increasingly radical in their far-right views and behavior while they were in the country.
The two men fled Ukraine in 2017 after easing fighting, and then tried their luck by joining forces in South Sudan. They never got it. Instead, he was arrested and deported to the U.S., where authorities complained that they would eventually reunite and plan an attack on Lorenzo to fund more foreign fighting adventures.
Since then, Lang has been in a detention facility or a form of house arrest in Ukraine. He currently lives in Kyiv with his bride and their little ones and has to carry an ankle monitor. In a court trial involving BuzzFeed News in February, he said he teaches English lessons to Ukrainians online to help his family.
In the same court, Lang accused the U.S. government of trying to prosecute him for alleged war crimes on the battlefields of Ukraine.
“Any separatist or Russian soldier I killed would be charged with murder,” he told a Ukrainian court. “Understand that the kidnapping of any soldiers I’ve caught is a burden.”
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