VIENNA (AFP)---A Swiss psychiatric expert is being called in to determine whether alleged Croatian Nazi war criminal Milivoj Asner is unfit for questioning as Austrian doctors claim, a daily reported on Friday.

In order to fend off accusations that Austria is shielding 95-year-old Asner, Marc Graf will examine the suspect, the Kleine Zeitung quoted Norbert Jenny, spokesman for the regional court in Klagenfurt, as saying.

" We've now asked a well-respected Swiss expert to examine Asner so that it can't be claimed that Austria is fudging," Jenny said.

Public prosecutors had proposed asking Graf to examine Asner and the expert will be officially appointed by the judge in charge of the case next week, Jenny added.

Graf is a psychiatric and psychotherapy specialist and is deputy chief of the department of forensics at the university pyschiatric clinics in Basel.

He is also a member of a Swiss expert commission for assessing dangerous criminals.

So far, four separate medical reports in Austria have concluded that Asner suffers from dementia and not fit to be questioned.

Efforts to extradite Asner -- who has been living in Klagenfurt since 2006 under the name Georg Aschner -- to Croatia were dropped as result of those reports.

But Nazi hunters have repeatedly questioned the reports' findings, especially after pictures were published in the British newspaper The Sun showing Asner and his wife relaxing on a terrace among Euro 2008 football fans.

Asner, the "fourth most wanted Nazi" on the list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is accused of having organised the deportation of Serbs, Jews and gypsies to Nazi concentration camps, where most of them died.

He allegedly served as police chief under the fascist Ustase movement, which governed Croatia during World War II in alliance with Nazi Germany.

The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, recently accused Austria of being "a paradise for war criminals."

Asner has given a number of interviews in recent months in which he does appear to be lucid. In June, he told Austrian public television ORF he was ready to surrender to Croatian authorities.

ejpress.org