US halts deportation of war crimes suspect

Published on Saturday 4 April 2009 19:57

A US court has blocked the deportation of accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, two days before he was to have been sent to Germany to face charges relating to the deaths of 29,000 Jews.

The order from Wayne Iskra, an immigration judge in Virginia, said the stay would remain in effect until the question of whether his case should be reopened is decided.

Lawyers for the 89-year-old had asked for an emergency stay, saying Demjanjuk's health was so poor he could not make the trip.

Born in Ukraine, he has denied any role in the Holocaust. He said he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944.

He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being a sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 died. That country's highest court later ruled he was not "Ivan" and he returned to the United States.

But US officials in 2002 stripped him of his citizenship, saying that he had worked at three other camps and had hidden that information at his US entry in 1951.

He was ordered to be deported in December 2006, but remained in the country through legal challenges and because there were no demands from other countries that he be sent to them.

Last year, Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator, Kurt Schrimm, asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk lived before he emigrated to the United States, to charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.

Schrimm said his office had evidence Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor and personally led Jews to the gas chambers.

Last month, Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk and asked the US to deport him so he could stand trial.

The US Justice Department opposed what it described as the last-minute filings by Demjanjuk's lawyer that sought to prevent his deportation from the United States.

Eli Rosenbaum of the department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations told the judge Demjanjuk's requests should be rejected.

"They are based on frivolous claims that legitimate German legal proceedings against him would subject him to torture," Rosenbaum said.