BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court sentenced a 90-year-old former
Nazi army commander to life in prison on Tuesday for murdering
10 Italian civilians and attempting to kill another in
Tuscany in 1944.
After an 11-month trial, the Munich court found German Josef Scheungraber guilty
of ordering the murder of the civilians in Falzano
di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo, as
a reprisal for attacks by Italian partisans.
"As
the only officer present, the accused led and
supervised the execution of the reprisal orders," said the court in a statement.
"The
act of revenge, directed exclusively at civilians,
was driven first and foremost by revenge but
also by anger and hatred," the court added.
Four Italian
civilians, including a 74-year-old woman, were
shot dead in the street before German soldiers
rounded up a further 11 people and herded them
into a house and blew it up.
Ten of the
11 died but a 15-year-old boy, Gino Massetti,
survived with serious injuries. He gave evidence
at the trial.
The court
had insufficient evidence to convict Scheungraber,
who looked fit as he entered the court room on
one crutch and was dressed in a traditional Bavarian
cloth jacket, for the four shootings, said a
spokeswoman.
FURNITURE
SHOP
Prosecutors
said the past had caught up with Scheungraber.
"At
last we are satisfied that the guilt amassed
by the accused during the war is being and will
be atoned for," state prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz told Reuters TV.
Scheungraber,
who spent decades after World War Two as a free
man in his home state of Bavaria running a furniture
shop, had denied the charges and said he had
handed over the individuals in question to the
military police.
German media
have reported that he regularly took part in
marches for fallen Nazi soldiers.
The case is
one of Germany's last Nazi trials, alongside
the forthcoming case of John Demjanjuk, a suspected
death camp guard who was deported from the United
States in May to face charges he helped murder
nearly 28,000 people during World War Two.
The Simon
Wiesenthal Center, which hunts suspected Nazi
war criminals, welcomed the verdict and praised
recent efforts by German authorities to bring
Nazi criminals to justice.
"The
verdict strengthens the view that the long time
gap in no ways diminishes the perpetrator's guilt
and that age offers no legal protection for the
murders," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Center's Jerusalem office in a statement.
Scheungraber
was convicted in absentia to life in prison on
Sept 28, 2006 by a military tribunal in La Spezia
for his part in the Falzano di Cortona massacre.
reuters.com
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