Vienna (dpa) - Justice Minister Karin Gastinger pledged on Wednesday she will "use all means" to bring two prominent Austrian Nazi war criminals to justice.

Quoted by the newspaper Standard, the minister's spokesman Christoph Poechinger added there could even be a reward for the apprehension of one of the two men, both aged in their 90s, Milivoj Asner and Aribert Heim. However, the interior ministry was responsible for rewards.

Asner is within easy reach of the Austrian law. For more than a year he has been living freely in the southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt. Heim is in hiding and is believed to be in Spain.

The report said the minister was reminded of the two cases not by her own justice authorities, but by the Director of the Jerusalem Simon Wiesenthal Centre Efraim Zuroff.

At present, Klagenfurt public prosecutor Helmut Jamnig was said to be studying voluminous documents supplied by Croatia about the activities of Asner there in World War II.

In early September, Zuroff called on the Austrian government to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest of former SS doctor Heim.

In an open letter to Gastinger, Zuroff suggested the same sum as already offered by the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, 130,000 euros.

Heim, born in Radkersberg in Austria in June 1914, is accused of having brutally murdered large numbers of victims in the Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp in 1941, many of them by heart injection.

Asner, also aged 91, is accused of war crimes against Serbs and Jews under the fascist Croatian Ustasha regime during World War II.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), 28.09.2005