January 27, 2003 Associated Press
 
  After objections, ad seeking info about alleged Nazis fails to run in Estonian newspapers  
 


By MICHAEL TARM

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) A newspaper advertisement offering a US $10,000 reward for information about Nazi war criminals didn't run in Estonia's daily newspapers Tuesday after police objected. 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 Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The ad that was supposed to run Tuesday in Estonia included copy reading, "During the Holocaust, Estonians murdered Jews in Estonia as well as in other countries," the Wiesenthal Center said. It urged anyone with information to call the ex-Soviet republic's Security Police Board, which investigates war crimes cases.

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

"We are not able to say that an ad cannot be published," Kuurmann told The Associated Press Tuesday. "We just said we didn't like that our name and number was there."

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

A copy of the letter, released to journalists by the Security 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 Police Board's claims. He also blasted its 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 said, speaking by phone 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."

Media House could not immediately be reached for comment.

During the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation of the Baltic states, tens of thousands of Jews were killed, including more than 200,000 in Lithuania. In Estonia, some 1,000 Estonian Jews were killed, while about 4,500 fled to Russia before the Nazis invaded. Several thousand Jews from other countries were sent to Estonia and killed there. After regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Baltics vowed to prosecute any living Nazi war criminals _ though that process has proved difficult with the few remaining suspects in their
80s and 90s.