Judges in Lithuania will decide Monday whether a former Cleveland real estate agent persecuted Jews during World War II.

In a three- day trial that ended Wednesday, prosecutors accused Algimantas Dailide of helping to arrest Jews for the Security Police in Nazi-occupied Lithuania .

Dailide, 85, has denied the charges, saying that he was a simple clerk. If convicted, Dailide could serve more than five years in prison.

He was deported to Germany in 2003 after U.S. District Judge Paul Matia in Cleveland concluded that Dailide was not just a clerk, but a man who actively aided the Nazis in Vilnius , Lithuania 's capital. Nearly 55,000 Jews were killed there during the war.

A historian for the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit found records stating that Dailide carried a pistol and helped stop a truck filled with people trying to flee. Matia and appellate judges cited the documents in their rulings against Dailide.

In a phone interview, the Lithuanian prosecutor handling the case, Rimvydas Valentukevieius, said he used the Justice Department's documents, as well as Lithuanian archives, to present the case.

Jewish leaders around the world have watched the case closely, hoping it will encourage other countries to prosecute men accused of war crimes, no matter their age.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center , a Jewish human rights organization, fears that Lithuania 's residents want to forget about the Holocaust, despite the strength of the case against Dailide.

"Let's put it this way: If he gets off, Vilnius will become the capital of judicial farce," Zuroff said. "The evidence is so strong against him."

For 30 years, Dailide ran AMD Realty on St. Clair Avenue . In 1994, the Justice Department sought to revoke his citizenship, claiming that Dailide lied about his wartime past when he entered the United States in 1955.

He later left Cleveland and settled in Gulfport , Fla. , a suburb of Tampa .

His son, Al, of Medina , could not be reached.

Dailide's attorney in Cleveland, Joseph McGinness, has been his biggest supporter.

"He has done absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing," McGinness said. "He was a clerk who did menial jobs. That's it."