VIENNA, Austria --Austrian authorities are investigating an alleged Nazi war criminal living in Tyrol who was convicted in absentia in Italy for his involvement in the 1944 slaughter of hundreds of civilians, an official said Monday.

The probe of Hubert Bichler, 88, began earlier this year, said Wilfried Siegele, a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in the western city of Innsbruck.

Bichler was one of 10 former Nazi SS members convicted in absentia by an Italian military tribunal in January 2007 for Italy's worst World War II-era civilian massacre.

In 1944, Nazi troops slaughtered more than 700 residents in Marzabotto - most of them children, women or the elderly - in what was ostensibly a hunt for resistance fighters.

Siegele said the Justice Ministry was waiting for Italian authorities to provide Bichler-related documents. He declined to provide more details. A Justice Ministry spokeswoman did not return repeated calls for comment.

The Kurier newspaper reported that Bichler lives in the Tyrollean town of Hopfgarten, not far from Kitzbuehel.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomed news of the probe but said the Alpine republic could be doing so much more.

"I wouldn't be too impressed by the fact that an investigation has been opened because almost none of the investigations in Austria have resulted in trials," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the center's Israel branch.

"There have been no convictions of Nazi war criminals in Austria in more than three decades - and that's not for a lack of Nazi war criminals," he added during a telephone interview.

The Wiesenthal Center is particularly upset by the case of Milivoj Asner, a war crimes suspect living in southern Austria who is ranked No. 4 on the center's list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects. The 95-year-old is wanted for atrocities against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in Croatia.

Austrian authorities say Asner suffers from dementia and is unfit to stand trial, but have refused the center's request to send a foreign medical expert in to evaluate him.

Austria also has offered 50,000 euros ($68,400) for information leading to the arrest of Aribert Heim, a concentration camp doctor, or Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the Gestapo officer who organized the extermination of the Jews.

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