The Prague City Court has ruled that Russian citizen Alexander Franchetti, detained at the airport, is to be put under arrest, where he will await the results of the consideration of the issue of his extradition to Ukraine, the Czech edition Novinky.cz reported.
Journalists note that after the announcement of the court’s decision, Franchetti’s lawyer Jan Schwartz told reporters that Ukraine’s extradition request was “politically motivated and had nothing to do with criminal activity.”
“Arrest is a common thing in extradition procedures. It rarely happens that a client is released. Let’s hope that during a decision on extradition, the court will not succumb to politicization,” journalists quoted Schwartz as saying.
The lawyer added that if Franchetti was extradited to Ukraine, he would “face torture and could face death.”
As reported, on Sept. 12, law enforcement agencies of the Czech Republic detained a citizen of the Russian Federation Alexander Franchetti at the Prague International Airport at the request of Ukraine.
On Sept. 13, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine applied to the Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic with a repeated request for the extradition of a citizen of the Russian Federation Alexander Franchetti detained in Prague.
For the first time with such a request, Ukrainian law enforcement officers turned to their Czech colleagues back in August 2020, and on Sept. 13 they confirmed the relevance of the extradition request.
Law enforcers clarified that Franchetti is being sought to prosecute for participation in the illegal armed formations “Self-Defense of Crimea” and “North Wind” (Article 260 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).
Kyiv’s Holosiyivsky District Court has already chosen a measure of restraint in relation to the suspect in the form of detention.
