Cairo -- Documents have surfaced in Egypt showing that the world's most wanted
Nazi war criminal, concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim,
died of intestinal cancer here on Aug. 10, 1992, Germany's
ZDF television and the New York Times reported Wednesday.
The report said Heim had converted to Islam and was living under the name Tarek
Hussein Farid.
ZDF said that in a joint effort with the newspaper, it
located a passport, application for a residence permit,
bank slips, personal letters and medical papers --
in all, more than 100 documents -- left by Heim in
a briefcase in the hotel room where he lived.
Egyptian dentist Tarek Abdelmoneim
Rifai said Heim was a patient of his father, also a dentist.
He said Wednesday that he had seen Heim only a few times,
20 years ago, but confirmed that he knew of his death.
"He died in 1992.
I didn't know that he was a doctor and that he is the
most wanted Nazi war criminal. I am surprised," he said in a telephone interview. "He introduced himself to my father as a German, and I know that he converted
to Islam and changed his name."
Heim, an Austrian doctor with Adolf Hitler's infamous
SS, evaded West German police in 1962 as they prepared
to prosecute him. He was nicknamed "Dr.
Death" for killing hundreds of Jewish prisoners at the Nazis' Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria.
Heim is said to have removed
organs from victims without anesthetic. He kept the skull
of a man he decapitated as a paperweight. Witnesses told
investigators that he worked closely with SS pharmacist
Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting
various solutions into prisoners' hearts to see which
killed them the fastest.
ZDF quoted Heim's son Ruediger
Heim as confirming that Tarek Hussein Farid was his father's
assumed name and that the documents belonged to him.
Heim said he visited his father regularly in Cairo and
had taken care of him after an operation related to his
cancer in 1990.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's
chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said he had not seen
the documents and that although it seemed there was "definitely a strong possibility" they pointed to Heim's death in Cairo in 1992, they needed to be examined by
experts.
However, if it turns out to
be true, he said, "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms
of prosecuting people who helped Aribert Heim escape
justice."
Ruediger Heim refused to comment
to the Associated Press on the assertion that his father
had died in 1992.
ZDF reported that Aribert
Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo,
where graves are reused after several years, so "the chance of finding remains is unlikely."
latimes.com
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