Austria's legal system and its insufficient zeal in investigating alleged crimes committed under Hitler's Third Reich make it a "paradise for Nazi war criminals," a top Nazi hunter said on Wednesday.

Frustrated at slow progress in finding suspected war criminals in Austria and bringing them to court, Simon Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff came to Vienna for talks with ministers aimed at accelerating the process.

"The law in this country does more to protect Nazis than to bring them to justice," Zuroff told reporters after talks with Austria's ministers for justice and the interior.

"There is a system here that makes Austria a paradise for Nazi war criminals, plain and simple," he added.

Austria's interior ministry declined to comment while the justice ministry was not immediately available for comment.

One case Zuroff raised in his meetings was that of Milivoj Asner, who fled Croatia after being exposed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and now lives in the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt.

Zagreb has asked Vienna to extradite him but Austria has so far refused on the grounds he is Austrian and is therefore ineligible for extradition, Zuroff said.

Austria is investigating the accusations against Asner, which include overseeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies to Nazi concentration camps.

Because Asner is alleged to have played a part in people's killings but not to have killed anyone himself, he cannot be tried in Austria because a statute of limitations applies to such crimes, Zuroff said.

Zuroff argues that Asner, who has Croatian and Austrian passports, should be deported because he obtained Austrian citizenship "under false pretences" by not declaring he was wanted for war crimes.

"The only hope we have here is that his Austrian citizenship gets canceled," Zuroff said.

Zuroff also said not enough was being done to find war crimes suspects or inform the public of who these suspects are.

"There are too many people in this country who want these problems to disappear. This is the problem, and this is why we came here to press the case because if we didn't press the case nothing would happen."

He criticized the way investigations were handled. "Apparently the modus operandi is not to look very hard for evidence and then to speak to the suspect and ask him: 'Well, are you guilty?"' he said.

Reuters, 1.02.2006