Vienna (dpa) - Austria is also looking for former Nazi concentration camp doctor and mass murderer Aribert Heim, said the Interior Ministry on Monday.

Spokesman Rudolf Gollia said a warrant for Heim's arrest had been issued by Linz District Court on September 27. The warrant had been entered into the Schengen Information System and thereby spread to the other E.U. states and some third countries.

Heim, now aged 91, is primarily believed to be in Spain. But director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, said he was not certain whether Heim was still there. "There is speculation that he has perhaps got away to other countries."

Heim was born in the Austrian province of Styria in 1914, and qualified as a physician in Vienna in 1940.

He is accused of having murdered hundreds of victims by torture or injections in brutal "medical experiments" in the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen.

After the war he worked as a doctor in southern Germany. In 1962, when he was finally charged under law, he fled and went into hiding.

Zuroff has described Heim as "the most brutal concentration camp doctor besides Mengele".

In Germany, an Interior Ministry spokesman said there was great interest in "possibly, after all, bringing one of the last great, notorious criminals to his just punishment".

Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), 17.10.2005