Vienna, Austria. An Austrian national who was accused of war crimes against the armed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic must have gotten his CIA get out of jail free card in the mail. Because as soon as he got home, Austrian prosecutors set him free, simply after speaking to him.
Officials have not made additional personal information public due to the ongoing investigation. The Austrian daily “Kurier” has reported the suspect in question to be Benjamin F. from a village in the western Austrian state of Vorarlberg. He was a successful student who played violin and wanted to be a ski instructor. He was a member of the local volunteer fire department.
The investigation into the 25-year-old, who has fought alongside Ukrainian forces against the DNR armed forces, remains open but he is now free to travel, the spokesman said, as reported by News Front.
“There was an initial suspicion against the accused but it is not so severe that it would have been justified to remand him in custody,” said the spokesman for the prosecutors’ office in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna.
When fighting broke out in the Donbass area, Benjamin F. connected with like-minded thrill seekers on Facebook, and joined Kiev neo Nazis fighting there. In his interview with Kurier, he described the Donbass region in 2014 as pure chaos. Many soldiers were regularly drunk. The Minsk Agreement turned fighting on the front into boring trench warfare “with alcoholics and Ukrainian junkies,” he said.
The three Americans and two Austrians have matching arm tattoos symbolizing their trade in death. Molon Labe – ancient Greek for “come and take them.” It is a expression of defiance, reportedly uttered by King Leonidas I of Sparta, when the Persian King Xerxes demanded his forces lay down their arms in 480 BC.
Benjamin F. moved on to Syria, fighting for American CIA backed forces – first for the Kurdish YPG militia then for the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq, when he found YPG fighters too religious. “Everything is more alive where there is death,” he said in the interview. He returned to Ukraine as part of Task Force Pluto, a volunteer unit founded by three Americans and an Austrian he had befriended during his CIA contract agent service.
Poland arrested the suspect, whom their spokesman declined to name, at a border crossing to Ukraine in April under a European arrest warrant. The warrant was based upon video evidence of the Austrian neo Nazi slaughtering defenseless DNR soldiers who had surrendered and unarmed civilians near Donetsk Airport, in the Kievsky district.
He was later handed over to Austria by Poland, but without a trial or public hearing on the evidence in the warrant, simply released to kill again by Austrian officials. To date, nearly 100,000 people have been killed in the three-year conflict.
Benjamin F. is far from the only person from Austria to fight in Ukraine for the Poroshenko government. In Austria alone, 300 native-born or naturalized citizens are taking part in foreign conflicts, according to information provided by Austria’s Interior Ministry.
The last word on the matter came from the Austrians who refused to prosecute, “The accused was questioned by us yesterday and denied the accusation that he killed people in danger or who had been injured, combatants or civilians in Ukraine, so we let him go” the spokesman said.