Nazi war criminal faces new charges

JOHN Demjanjuk, who was convicted earlier this year for his role in killing 28,000 Jews in the Sobibor Nazi death camp, may be prosecuted for similar crimes at another Nazi concentration camp.

According to a German newspaper the former guard may have been involved in activities at Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Bavaria.

"There is initial suspicion based on a report," Gerhard Heindl, state prosecutor for the prosecution office in Bavaria's Weiden, was quoted as saying in yesterday's edition of Germany's Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.

The allegations - brought by two figures who were involved in the Sobibor case - refer to Demjanjuk's time as a guard at the Flossenbuerg camp from October 1943 to December 1944, according to the newspaper.

The two men say that during Demjanjuk's time in the camp 4,974 people were killed.

In May of this year, a Munich court convicted the 91-year-old of helping to kill 28,000 people at the Sobibor camp in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War, sentencing him to five years in prison. He was freed because of his age.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk had been in a German jail since he was extradited from the United States two years ago. He is now stateless.

Demjanjuk, once top of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazi criminals, has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 and then taken prisoner by the Germans.

He was initially sentenced to death two decades ago in Israel for being the so-called "Ivan the Terrible" camp guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal by Israel's supreme court in 1993 after new evidence emerged pointing to a case of mistaken identity.