German
prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for 88-year-old
US resident John Demjanjuk on suspicion he helped in at least
29,000 murders as a Nazi death camp guard, they said on today.
Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory in the killings of Jews between March
and September 1943 at the Sobibor death camp, now in
Poland, prosecutors in the southern German city of Munich
said in a statement.
They want to extradite the retired auto worker.
"As soon as the
accused is in Germany, (we) intend to examine him and
charge him with being an accessory to 29,000 murders," the prosecutors said in the statement.
Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk
denies any involvement in war crimes. He has said he
was in the Soviet army and a prisoner of war in 1942.
He later went to the United States.
Stripped of his US citizenship
after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp, Demjanjuk was first extradited to Israel
in 1986.
He was sentenced to death
in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a
guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned
his conviction when new evidence showed another man was
probably the notorious "Ivan".
Demjanjuk returned to his
home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored
his citizenship in 1998.
The U.S. Justice Department
refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had
worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death
camps and hid these facts when he immigrated.
Last year, Germany's chief
Nazi war crimes investigator in Ludwigsburg, Kurt Schrimm,
asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk lived before
he emigrated to the United States, to charge him with
involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.
Schrimm said his office had
evidence Demjanjuk had been a guard at the Sobibor death
camp and personally led Jews to the gas chambers there.
Nazi hunters at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center welcomed Germany's move. Efraim Zuroff,
head of the Center's Jerusalem Office, said in a statement
he hoped there would be no more delays. Previously, the
Center had criticised German prosecutors for dragging
their feet.
A spokesman for Germany's
Justice Ministry said it was trying to establish whether
the US would deport Demjanjuk or whether Germany would
officially start extradition proceedings.
Last month, Demjanjuk's ex
son-in-law said the suspect was in poor health and unfit
to face another trial.
independent.co.uk
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