HE looks like any sprightly old gent raising a glass to his team at Euro 2008.

But nearly 70 years ago Milivoj Asner played a part in the greatest crime in human history.

As a police chief and Gestapo agent in wartime Croatia, Asner is said to have effectively signed the death warrants of hundreds of Jews, gipsies and Serbs by approving their removal to Nazi concentration camps.

He dodged justice for 50 years by changing his name.

Somehow he continues to do so even though his true identity is out and an international warrant has been issued for his arrest.

Austria is bending over backwards to shield this man. It says he is too ill to return to Croatia to face the music.

Yet there he is, strolling down the road to watch the football.

This scandal reflects badly on a country infamous as a haven for old war criminals and whose citizens’ obsessive privacy is blamed for the horrific Josef Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch kidnap cases.

Disturbingly, locals know well who the old man living among them is. And what he was.

One describes him as an "SS man" and in the same breath adds: "He’s a super old man."

It doesn’t matter that Asner is 95. Nor that his alleged crimes were committed a lifetime ago.

There can be no time limit on a prosecution for genocide.

Austria must hand him over.

Dead horse

THE EU "treaty" is dead. Who says so? Our own Foreign Secretary.

David Miliband is bang-on when he insists the Irish "No" vote cannot be ignored.

Ireland’s PM must read the last rites, he says.

Gordon Brown too accepts the game is up — the detested treaty cannot now become EU law.

So why is the Government ploughing on with pushing it through Parliament?

Can’t they take no for an answer?

Pull the plug on it now.

Helmet farce

WHY is a hard-up police force spending a fortune in public money trying to make a helmet fit over a turban?

When a Sikh officer applies to join a counter-terrorism unit, he ought to consider whether he is physically able to wear the necessary protective gear.

Not whether it can be expensively redesigned to fit him.

Sikhs wear turbans instead of motorbike helmets at their own risk.

This officer could have joined the unit and taken a similar chance without the force stinging taxpayers for £100,000.

thesun.co.uk