TALLINN

Newspapers in Estonia did not publish an advertisement by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center offering a large reward for information about alleged Nazi criminals after the Security Police had asked not to print its name and telephone number in it.

The ad, which was supposed to have run in the Jan. 28 edition, included text reading: "During the Holocaust, Estonians murdered Jews in Estonia as well as in other countries."
The ad urged anyone with information to call the Security Police Board, which investigates war crimes.

Security Police spokesman Henno Kuurmann said the unit asked a local advertising agency hired by the Simon Wiesenthal Center not to run the ad with its name and telephone number.

" We can't say that an ad cannot be published," Kuurmann told the Associated Press. "We just said we didn't like that our name and number was there."

In a letter Kuurmann sent to the advertising agency, he said it was "misleading to publish (our) contact information ... as the Security Police Board has not laid out the stated $10,000 award."

A copy of the letter, released to journalists by the Security Police Board, also argued that the ad's statement about Estonians killing Jews outside the country had not been proven.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office, disputed the claims. He also blasted the intervention and said he wanted an explanation from the Baltic-based ad agency -including about how authorities got a copy of the ad before it was published.

" This is outrageous. It's free expression that's harmed," he told AP from Jerusalem. "The victims are the Estonian public. I stand by the text ... There's nothing inaccurate or inflammatory in it. We will issue a protest."

Similar ads ran in neighboring Latvia earlier this month and in Lithuania late last year, part of Operation Last Chance - an effort to prosecute Nazi war criminals led by the Los Angeles-based center.

The center said in a press release that failing to run the ad was "a sad reflection on the inability of far too many Estonians to accept the sad reality of the complicity of some of their nationals in the crimes of the Holocaust."

The center said considering that an international historians commission established by former President Lennart Meri has confirmed that Estonian police participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus in 1942.