WASHINGTON
(AFP) – Suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk will fight to
the bitter end against a ruling to extradite him to Germany
to be tried for alleged complicity in the murder of thousands
of Jews during World War II, his lawyer said Monday.
Lawyers will refile a motion by Wednesday to halt his extradition and reopen
his case, his attorney John Broadley told AFP hours after
a US immigration judge lifted a stay of deportation against
the 89-year-old Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk.
"The immigration court
judge said that, because of a technicality, our motion to
reopen the case should have been filed in the Board of Immigration
Appeals, not in the immigration court. So we are refiling," Broadley told AFP.
"We have until the 8th
to file," he said, adding that the motion would probably be lodged with the board of appeals
on Tuesday.
Demjanjuk, who changed his name from
Ivan to John after emigrating to the United States in 1952
and who some believe is the brutal Nazi death camp guard
nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible", is wanted in Germany on charges of assisting in the murders of thousands of
Jews at Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He was stripped of his US citizenship
in 2008 and last month American officials began the process
of extraditing the now-stateless Demjanjuk to Germany to
stand trial for crimes allegedly committed more than 60 years
ago.
Last week, his lawyer won him a stay
of deportation while immigration officials debated whether
or not to reopen Demjanjuk's "removal" case.
Broadley had argued that the octogenarian
was in poor health, and that jailing and trying him in Germany
would cause him pain amounting to torture.
But the brief stay was overturned
on Monday by immigration judge Wayne Iskra, who reasoned
that jurisdiction over the motion to bar Demjanjuk's deportation
did not lie with the immigration court but with the board
of appeals.
German prosecutors issued a warrant
last month for Demjanjuk's arrest, accusing him of complicity
in the murder of at least 29,000 Jews at Sobibor death camp,
where he served between March and September 1943.
Around a quarter of a million Jews
died at Sobibor from when the camp was opened in the spring
of 1942 until the Nazis shut it down after a mass uprising
in October 1943, in which hundreds of prisoners managed to
escape.
US investigators have brought together
witnesses who described how Demjanjuk was seen at Sobibor,
kicking Jews or hitting them with his rifle butt to herd
them out of railway wagons and into the gas chambers more
quickly.
The Office for Special Investigations
(OSI) in the United States has described Sobibor "as close an approximation of Hell as has ever been created on this planet."
Former wartime inmates of Nazi camps
in occupied Poland in 1977 identified Demjanjuk as brutal
Ukrainian prison guard "Ivan the Terrible" during a US Justice Department investigation.
Demjanjuk was sentenced to death by
a court in Israel, but the penalty was overturned five years
later by Israel's Supreme Court after statements from other
former guards identified another man as the sadistic "Ivan."
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