ROME:
Italian authorities appeared at a loss yesterday on what
to do with the body of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke
who died last week while living under house arrest for
massacring 335 civilians.
A funeral on Tuesday for the former SS captain by an ultra-conservative Catholic
splinter group degenerated into street battles and was
shut down by the police to prevent a neo-Nazi rally.
The officiating priest Pierpaolo
Petrucci, however, told Italian daily La Stampa that
he did in fact complete the funeral mass at the seminary
of the Society of St Pius X in Albano Laziale.
“I held the funeral, including
the blessing of the body, the Catholic liturgical rite
for the end of the funeral mass,” Petrucci was quoted
as saying.
Priebke’s lawyer Paolo Giachini
– a friend, business partner and defender of top neo-fascist
militants – had claimed the funeral was cancelled.
Giachini said he had been
given power of attorney by Priebke’s son, Ingo Priebke,
to dispose of the body according to the family’s wishes
but said it had been “kidnapped” by Italian authorities.
His claims could not be independently
verified.
The Italian news agency ANSA
reported on Thursday that the body was still being held
at a military airport outside Rome, denying earlier reports
that it had been transferred to an undisclosed location.
The possibility of the body
being flown to Priebke’s native Germany for burial or
cremation was mooted on Wednesday but German authorities
said it should be the family that decides.
There is concern that a burial
could become a pilgrimage point for neo-Nazi militants,
dozens of whom attended the ceremony on Tuesday near
Rome and later clashed with hundreds of protesters.
Priebke was unapologetic to
the end for his part in the massacre of 335 civilians,
including 75 Jews, executed in the Ardeatine caves near
Rome in retaliation for a partisan attack on Nazi troops.
Immediately after World War
II, he escaped from a British POW camp. He was provided
with Vatican travel documents by a pro-Nazi Austrian
bishop and fled to Argentina, like many Nazi war criminals.
He lived there for decades
before being extradited to Italy and convicted at a trial
that included witnesses who were children at the time
and saw him shooting victims in the back of the neck. freemalaysiatoday.com
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