Lisbon, 18 Mar Portuguese Mário Machado, founder of several neo-Nazi organizations and who was obliged to report every 15 days at a police station, will be able to stop complying with this measure while he is fighting in Ukraine, as decided by the Lisbon Criminal Instruction Court. The court's decision, which accepted a request from Machado appealing to take account of the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, was confirmed to EFE by Machado's lawyer, José Manuel de Castro. Machado, founder of neo-Nazi organizations such as the National Front and Nova Ordem Social, was arrested last November for illegal possession of weapons, as part of an investigation into hate crimes, racism and incitement to violence following comments posted on the Internet. The judge then decided to force him, as a measure of coercion, to appear biweekly at a police station. Machado will leave for Ukraine with seven other Portuguese people to join a far-right militia that is in Lviv, although it is not the Azov Battalion, according to reports from the Portuguese weekly Expresso. Machado has accumulated several convictions for crimes of racial hatred and offense to physical integrity, among others. Among these penalties, in 1997 he was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for his involvement in the murder of Alcino Monteiro, a Portuguese of Cape Verdean origin who died at the hands of a group of skinheads, and in 2009 to seven years and two months for kidnapping, robbery and coercion. CHIEF pfm/sea/alf