Wanted Nazi war criminal died in Syria four years ago: report News
Wanted Nazi war criminal died in Syria four years ago: report

[JURIST] Nazi-hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center [advocacy website] Efraim Zuroff told [BBC report] the BBC Monday that he is certain that wanted Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner died in Syria four years ago. Zuroff said that new information from a former German secret service agent indicates that Brunner died in 2010 and is buried in an unknown grave in Damascus. Brunner, who was a captain in the SS, was accused of sending 47,000 Jews in Austria, 44,000 in Greece, 23,500 in France and 14,000 in Slovakia to extermination camps during WWII. Brunner is believed to have fled to Syria in the 1950s and allegedly served as an adviser to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, a fact denied by the Syrian government. He was sentenced [LAT report] to life in prison in absentia by a French court in 2001.

Prosecutors are in a race against time to find and prosecute the few remaining living Nazi war criminals who have escaped justice. In September German prosecutors charged [JURIST report] a 93-year-old former Waffen SS volunteer with aiding in the murder of at least 300,000 people during his time as a volunteer at Auschwitz. Last year German prosecutors brought a 92-year-old former Nazi to trial [JURIST report]. However, his case was dropped [JURIST report] in January due to too many gaps in the evidence. In June 2013 Hungarian prosecutors charged [JURIST report] Laszlo Csatary, a 98-year-old Hungarian man, with the unlawful execution and torture of people in connection with the Holocaust. Csatary died [JURIST report] in August 2013 while awaiting trial.