Lithuanian prosecutors said Wednesday they are dropping a war crimes investigation of an Israeli Holocaust historian who served with Soviet forces in the Baltic state.

In a statement, the prosecutor's office cited a "failure to collect sufficient data grounding primary suspicions" as its reason for halting its investigation of Yitzhak Arad, 81, who worked with Soviet security forces in the wake of World War II.

"During the investigation, 83 persons were questioned as witnesses (and) 14 of them were acknowledged as victims. None of the interviewed persons confirmed knowing anything and being able to witness the involvement of Y. Arad in a criminal act," the prosecutor's office said.

However, it said it was continuing to look into the activities of the Vilnius Battalion, the wartime partisan unit with which Arad had served, and which was accused of killing civilians and anti-communist activists alike.

Lithuanian Jewish community leader Simonas Gurevicius welcomed the decision.

"This is a fair decision, and one we've been waiting for impatiently," he told AFP. "It's a very positive step for the development of relations between Lithuania and Israel, and between Lithuanians and the Jews of Lithuania."

Lithuanian and international Jewish groups were outraged when the prosecutor's office in 2006 began its investigation of Lithuanian-born Arad, based partially on his memoirs.

Arad rejected allegations of murdering civilians and suggested the legal probe was a vendetta for his own painstaking efforts to record atrocities committed by Lithuanians who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war.

Arad's memoirs evoked the painful era when Lithuania was a battleground between Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Soviets seized Lithuania in 1940 under a deal with the Nazis, killing and deporting thousands of opponents, but Germany occupied the country when it turned on its erstwhile ally in 1941.

Over the following three years, the Nazis as well as Lithuanian collaborators killed 95 percent of Lithuania's 220,000-strong Jewish community.

Currently there are around 4,000 Jews living in Lithuania.

Arad first joined a Jewish anti-Nazi resistance group set up in one of the ghettos the Nazis had created to isolate and kill the country's Jews.

He later escaped from the ghetto and became a member of a Soviet partisan unit which fought both German troops and Lithuanian collaborators but which is also also alleged to have massacred innocent civilians.

The Red Army drove the Nazis out of Lithuania in 1944, and Arad worked with the Soviet NKVD secret police, which hunted down Lithuanian collaborators but also arrested, deported and killed thousands of others.

After the war, Arad emigrated to Israel and carved out a military career.

After retiring from the army he became an academic, and also served as head of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, for 21 years until retiring in 1993.

Lithuania broke from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004.

Some critics say prosecutors have spent too much effort since independence trying to settle communist-era scores, but investigators counter that it was impossible to bring people to account during Soviet rule.

The Arad case came amid a wider rise in tensions between Jewish groups and Lithuanian authorities.

Among the other disputes are Vilnius' alleged foot-dragging in enacting legislation to return to the Jewish community around 100 buildings which were seized by the Nazis and kept by the state during the Soviet era.

Lithuanian authorities counter that they cannot complete the process until different Jewish organisations agree on how to share out the buildings, for fear of facing later legal action from disgruntled groups.

africasia.com