BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- One of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals died
17 years ago in Egypt, the German public broadcaster ZDF
reported Wednesday.
The network says research it conducted with the New York Times shows that Aribert
Heim died in Cairo in 1992, according to ZDF's Web site.
The chief Nazi hunter at the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, said the news,
if true, is deeply disappointing.
"I personally feel
a tremendous sense of disappointment that he escaped
justice," Zuroff told CNN.
But he emphasized that he
had not seen the evidence that Heim was dead.
"There is no body
and no grave, so we can't do a DNA test," he said, adding that "there are people who have a vested interest in convincing us that he is no longer
alive."
He said he expects to see
the documentary evidence of Heim's death on Thursday.
Heim would be 94 years old if he were still alive.
Zuroff described Heim as "the
most wanted Nazi war criminal," and said the Simon Wiesenthal Center was about to raise the reward for information
about him from 315,000 euros ($405,000) to 1 million
euros ($1.3 million) when it heard the reports of his
death.
The investigation found that
Heim lived under the false name of Tarek Farid Hussein
in Cairo until August 10, 1992, when he died of intestinal
cancer.
ZDF says that eyewitness accounts
as well as documents prove that Tarek Farid Hussein was
in fact Aribert Heim.
During World War II Heim was
a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where
he was known to inmates as "Dr. Death" for performing often-fatal experiments on prisoners.
After the war, he was initially
cleared of wrongdoing, but in 1962 German authorities
issued an arrest warrant for him.
ZDF says it has spoken to
Heim's son, Ruediger Heim, who told the broadcaster that
his father fled Germany to Egypt via France, Spain and
Morocco.
Ruediger Heim told ZDF that
he visited his father in Cairo several times, including
in the final weeks of his life when the terminal cancer
was discovered.
ZDF says that a passport belonging
to Aribert Heim was among documents it retrieved.
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