AMSTERDAM, June 1 (Reuters) - The Dutch government asked
Germany on Wednesday to jail an 89-year-old Dutch Nazi
who escaped in 1952 from a Dutch prison where he was serving
a life sentence for killing Jewish prisoners at a Nazi
transit camp.
The Netherlands had already tried to extradite former SS soldier Klaas Carel
Faber using a European Arrest Warrant -- a European Union-wide
agreed extradition mechanism -- but a court in Munich turned
down the application on the grounds that Faber is now a German
citizen.
Dutch Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten
wrote to his German counterpart on Wednesday saying that
under European rules, Germany should impose on Faber the
life sentence he had been serving in the Netherlands.
"The public prosecutor
in Munich has informed the Dutch justice ministry it can
apply for enforcement of the sentence to be transferred.
Opstelten considers this a sign of willingness to implement
the sentence in Germany," the Dutch government said in a statement.
Faber was sentenced to death in 1947
for the killing of at least 11 people in the Westerbork camp
in the Netherlands, a staging post for Dutch Jews on their
journey to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Ukraine.
[ID:nLDE6AO1U6]
His brother, who was also a member
of the Dutch SS, was shot by firing squad after the war,
but Faber's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He
escaped from the prison and fled to Germany in 1952.
Dutch efforts to extradite Faber have
been frustrated by a German law preventing extradition of
German nationals for war crimes although Germany sentenced
another former Dutch Nazi, Heinrich Broere, to life in prison
in March last year.
A German court ruled in 1957 that
it had insufficient evidence to try Faber who, according
to Dutch newspaper reports, is living in the Bavarian town
of Ingolstadt and worked at local carmaker Audi.
In her comments to the German press,
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger
has been sympathetic to the Dutch requests regarding Faber.
Israel has also asked Germany to hand Faber over to the Dutch
authorities. (Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis; Editing by Sara
Webb and Tim Pearce) m.trust.org
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