A former US soldier was extradited from Ukraine on years-old charges that he participated in an alleged “international crime wave,” including the 2018 murders and robberies of a couple in Florida to finance plans to travel to Venezuela to carry out attacks. military-style attack against his government, federal prosecutors announced Monday.
In a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice, authorities noted that 34-year-old Craig Austin Lang has faced federal charges in Florida, North Carolina and Arizona since 2019. The Federal Bureau of Investigation brought Lang to the United States from Ukraine after the European Court of Human Rights rejected his request to challenge the extradition, the statement said. Lang, a U.S. citizen from Surprise, Arizona, pleaded not guilty in Florida on Monday, according to court documents.
Lang faces a range of charges in all three cases. They include using a gun during a violent and deadly crime in Florida, violating the Neutrality Act, and conspiring to kill people in a foreign country for his plans in Venezuela, which is a country with which the U.S. is at peace. , notes the prosecution.
Several months after the alleged murders in Florida, North Carolina Lang traded a military-grade smoke grenade, guns and money to use someone’s identity to apply for a U.S. passport, another indictment states. And in Arizona, he is accused of showing a U.S. passport to Mexican authorities in September 2018 to try to obtain a Mexican visa in violation of passport restrictions.
“Lang’s alleged conduct is shocking in its scope and in its callous disregard for human life,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
The Associated Press emailed an attorney listed for Lang seeking comment on the charges and extradition.
However, several others were indicted alongside Lang in the Florida and North Carolina cases and have since been convicted or found guilty.
The Florida murders occurred in April 2018, a year after Lang and another former U.S. Army soldier, Alex Jared Zwiefelhofer, met in Ukraine, where they claimed to be part of a volunteer battalion fighting Russian separatists. , authorities said. The two were detained in Kenya while trying to enter South Sudan in 2017 and were eventually deported to the US, according to an FBI affidavit.
In Florida, a 50-year-old couple from Brooksville planned to buy guns that Lang and Zwiefelhofer had listed for sale online, but the two men allegedly killed the couple to steal the $3,000 they were charged for the guns, authorities said.
In Facebook Messenger conversations that began the previous month, Lang and Zwiefelhofer discussed traveling to Florida, purchasing bulletproof vests, committing robberies, stealing boats, fleeing to South America or Ukraine, and smuggling weapons and ammunition, says the FBI testimony.
Federal authorities said they found records of Lang leaving Mexico City for Bogotá, Colombia, in September 2018, and then departing Colombia for Madrid, Spain, that November, with no record of Lang having re-entered. in the USA after leaving Mexico. The FBI agent’s affidavit, filed in August 2019, said social media posts showed Lang was in Ukraine at the time.
A jury convicted Zwiefelhofer in March on charges in the Florida case, including using a weapon during a violent and deadly crime and others. He is awaiting his sentence.
The AP emailed an attorney listed for Zwiefelhofer seeking comment on developments in the case involving Lang.
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