BERLIN (AP) — German authorities have received original documents indicating
the world's most-wanted Nazi fugitive died in Cairo in 1992,
and are investigating their validity, an official said Friday.
The papers — personal musings, official documents and other items that allegedly
belonged to SS doctor Aribert Heim — were turned over
to the Baden Wuerttemberg state police office that has
led the manhunt for the former Nazi for decades, spokesman
Horst Haug said.
He told The Associated Press
that the documents were turned over by "an attorney" but would not elaborate further. They were discovered by German television station
ZDF and the New York Times in a Cairo hotel where Heim
allegedly lived out the final years of his life before
dying of intestinal cancer, but it was not clear if the
media outlets had them in their possession.
The authenticity of the documents
is now being checked by experts who are examining details
like the age of the paper, the handwriting and fingerprints,
Haug said.
He had no estimate on how
long it could take to determine if they were genuine.
"There are a lot
of documents, and I don't know how many people have had
them in their hands — there could be a lot of fingerprints," he told the AP.
Heim, who would be 94 if alive
today, was a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp
in Austria in October and November 1941. Witnesses have
said he was involved in gruesome experiments, such as
injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts
to see which killed them the fastest.
ZDF reported the papers that
surfaced in Cairo included a passport, application for
a residency permit, bank slips, personal letters and
medical papers — in all more than 100 documents — that
were left behind by Heim in a briefcase in the hotel
room where he lived under the name Tarek Hussein Farid.
The television station quoted
Heim's son, Ruediger Heim, as confirming the pseudonym
Tarek Hussein Farid as his father's assumed name and
the documents as belonging 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.
ZDF reported that Heim was
buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves
are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely."
Haug's office has asked Egyptian
authorities for permission to travel to Cairo to look
for the corpse, but he said Friday that they had not
yet received a reply.
Meanwhile, Efraim Zuroff,
the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this
week asked Egyptian authorities for details on a list
of 29 Nazis his office believes found refuge in Egypt.
All on the list — compiled
by Wiesenthal himself in 1967 — are believed dead but
he said he was hoping that Egyptian authorities would
turn over what information they have.
They could "confirm
things that we weren't 100 percent certain of, and (the
list) also sheds light on Egypt's role as a haven for
Nazi war criminals — that's very important," he said.
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