MOSCOW, July 13. /TASS/. The foreign mercenaries who were sentenced to capital punishment in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) will be executed if their appeals are denied, DPR head Denis Pushilin divulged on Wednesday.
"All the foreigners filed appeals, we are awaiting a court session. If the court finds this punitive measure and the sentence to be appropriate, then their cases will be handed over to the corresponding agency to carry out the verdict. <...> [Capital punishment in the DPR] stipulates execution by firing squad. It’s not public," he told the Soloviev Live TV channel.
The DPR leader also specified that the evidence in cases involving more than 100 militants from the Ukrainian Azov nationalist battalion had been collected and their files would be handed over to the court. As DPR Justice Minister Yury Sirovatko said earlier, they had been mainly accused of terrorist activity and mass murder. "There are already more than 100 Azov members and their [guilt] has been proven. They have already been transferred from the locations where they had been kept as POWs to a pre-trial detention facility. All the further steps with regards to them are being prepared, in some instances it will be a direct court hearing, and in some - a tribunal," he explained.
Earlier, the DPR justice minister said that the appeals of the three foreign mercenaries sentenced to the death penalty in the DPR would be reviewed until the end of the month.
On June 9, a court in the DPR handed capital punishment verdicts to two British nationals, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, as well as Moroccan Brahim Saadoun, who were captured in Donbass, for participating in combat actions in Ukraine as mercenaries. The DPR’s Prosecutor General’s Office earlier said that testimony obtained from Pinner, Aslin and Saadoun proved their involvement in crimes such as forcible seizure of power and mercenary activities.