FACTBOX-Wiesenthal Center's top 10 WW2 war criminals

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Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:18am EDT

April 16 (Reuters) - Germany is seeking the deportation of accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk from the United States.

A U.S. appeals court halted his deportation this week and Demjanjuk was freed just hours after immigration agents carried him out of his Ohio home to send him to Germany for trial.

Demjanjuk is number two on a list of 10 most-wanted war criminals compiled by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Here are details about the 10 accused.

1. ARIBERT HEIM

-- Heim, known as Dr Death, is still top of the list, although German television station ZDF and the New York Times reported this year that he had died in Cairo in 1992, aged 78.

Heim killed hundreds at the Mounthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of poison and removed organs from victims without anaesthetic. Captured by U.S. forces near the end of World War Two but released in 1947, he worked as a doctor in West Germany until coming to the attention of war crimes investigators. He fled in 1962.

2. IVAN DEMJANJUK - United States:

-- Accused in 1977 of being the infamous "Ivan the Terrible", a Treblinka extermination camp guard, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death, then freed on subsequent evidence.

Returning to the United States in 1993, his citizenship was revoked in 2002 after a U.S. court convicted him of working at three other camps. German prosecutors, who issued an arrest warrant for him in March, suspect him of helping in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at the the Sobibor death camp.

The extradition was halted by an appeals court this week.

3. DR. SANDOR KEPIRO - Hungary:

-- Serbia's war crimes prosecutor in Sept. 2008 requested an investigation into the Hungarian suspected of committing genocide against Jews and Serbs in World War Two.

Prosecutors said Kepiro is suspected of taking part in a raid by Hungarian forces in Jan. 1942 in northern Serbia "when, in an attempt to destroy members of the Jewish and Serbian national groups, they killed at least 2,000 of them".

Sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1944; both that verdict, and his acquittal later the same year, came when Hungary was under fascist rule and an ally of Nazi Germany. In 2007 a Hungarian court ruled the then 93-year-old could not be investigated as his murder conviction had been overturned.

4. MILIVOJ ASNER - Austria:

-- Alleged to have been a senior security official during the 1941-45 rule of Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, Asner says he ordered wartime deportations of Jews and Serbs to their homelands, not to death camps in Croatia.

Asner moved to Austria when a Nazi-tracking group found him living in Croatia in 2005. Austria previously rejected a Croatian extradition request on grounds that Asner's physical and mental condition was fragile.

5. SOEREN KAM - Germany:

-- The Danish-born former SS member is accused of helping Nazi forces in Denmark, and of the 1943 murder of anti-Nazi Danish journalist Carl Henrik Clemmensen in Copenhagen.

Kam fled to Germany after the war, obtaining German citizenship in 1956. Following his 2006 arrest, a German court delayed a decision on his extradition to Denmark.

6. HEINRICH BOERE - Germany:

-- Accused of killing three Dutch civilians in 1944 as a member of an SS hit squad that targeted anti-Nazi resistance fighters, Boere confessed after being captured by U.S. forces.

Escaping to Germany, he was sentenced to death in absentia in Holland in 1949. After refusing a 1980 Dutch extradition request, a German court indicted him in April 2008.

Boere was due to be tried in Aachen early in 2009 in what would have been one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials, but in January the court there said a medical examination had found his health was too poor for him to stand trial.

7. KAROLY ZENTAI - Australia:

-- Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest. At the time Zentai was a 23-year-old warrant officer in the pro-Nazi Hungarian military, but argues he left Budapest with his regiment the day before the murder in 1944. He emigrated to Australia in the early 1950s and was arrested by Federal Police in July 2005. A Perth Federal Court judge last month upheld that Zentai was eligible for extradition to Hungary to face justice.

8. MIKHAIL GORSHKOW - Estonia:

-- Alleged to have been an interrogator for the Gestapo, he is accused of helping kill about 3,000 men, women and children in the Slutsk ghetto in Minsk, Belarus. Estonian-born Gorshkow became a U.S. citizen in 1953 but was denaturalised in 2002 and is under investigation in Estonia.

9. ALGIMANTAS DAILIDE - Germany:

-- Dailide volunteered for Lithuania's Nazi-backed secret police, the Saugumas, but said he was only a humble clerk.

Entering the United States in 1950, he worked as a real estate agent. In March 2006 Lithuania convicted the then 86-year-old of handing over Jews attempting to flee from the Vilnius ghetto. They were subsequently murdered. A Lithuanian court sentenced him to five years in jail, but suspended his sentence due to his health.

10. HARRY MANNIL - Venezuela:

-- The Caracas-based auto sales millionaire and member of Venezuelan high society is accused of arresting Jews and communists who were later executed by the Nazis while serving in Estonia's political police force during the Nazi occupation.

Cleared of the accusations by Estonia, he remains on a U.S. watch list barring him from entering the United States.

Sources: Reuters/Simon Wiesenthal Center/BBC (Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit;)



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