Vienna - Austria on Tuesday faced pressure to extradite an alleged Nazi-era war criminal for trial in his native Croatia after a British newspaper showed images of the 95-year-old walking through town in apparent good health. The Sun also published an interview with Milivoj Asner in which he denied wrongdoing, despite a expert affidavits to an Austrian court saying he was mentally too weak to testify or stand trial.

Croatia has charged Milivoj Asner with helping deport Jews, Gypsies and Serbs to concentration camps while serving in the police of the fascist Ustasha regime, Croatia's Nazi puppet state during World War II.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's top Nazi hunter pressed Austria to turn over Asner after The Sun published photos and video images Monday showing the man and his wife in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, mingling with fans at the Euro 2008 football championship and sitting in a cafe.

The images "make it abundantly clear that Asner is in good health, lucid and able to get around on his own," Efraim Zuroff said in a letter Monday to Austrian Justice Minister Maria Berger.

Any review of Asner's case is up to the state court in Klagenfurt, Austrian Justice Ministry spokesman Thomas Geiblinger said.

Extradition is illegal as long as the court rules he is unfit to stand trial, something that three expert reports to the court have affirmed since 2006, he said.

"The law is clear," Geiblinger told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "Of course, the situation as such is very unsatisfactory."

In an interview at his neat apartment in Klagenfurt, where he has lived for four years, Asner said he is ready to stand trial in Croatia because he wants to prove his innocence, The Sun reported Tuesday.

"I would welcome the chance to answer these accusations in a Croatian court. I don't have anything to do with it. I did not have enough responsibility to order deportation," the paper's online edition quoted Asner as saying.

Asner is on the Wiesenthal Centre's list of top Nazi war criminals that have avoided justice. As Ustasha police chief in Pozega during World War II, he orchestrated the destruction of the town's Serb, Jewish and Gypsy communities, Zuroff said.

In the Sun interview, Asner denied sending anyone to the notorious Ustasha concentration camp at Jasenovac.

"I don't know of anyone deported from Pozega. Nobody was murdered. I never heard of one single family murdered in Pozega," he was quoted as saying.

Asner left former Yugoslavia after Tito's communist partisans emerged victorious at the end of World War II.

He was granted Austrian citizenship in 1946 and returned to Croatia in 1991 after its nationalist leaders declared independence from Yugoslavia. In 2004, he returned to Austria.

Klagenfurt is the capital of Carinthia, a southern Austrian state governed by right-wing politician Joerg Haider.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has accused Austria in the past of dragging its feet in bringing Nazi war crimes suspects to justice.

"There has been a slight improvement in Austria's handling of Nazi war crimes cases, but much remains to be done if your country is to finally disprove its reputation as a paradise for Holocaust perpetrators," Zuroff said in his letter to the justice minister.

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