The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on Austrian authorities to extradite the alleged Croatian Nazi war criminal Milivoj Asner, who has been living in the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt since 2006. The move came after pictures were published in the British newspaper 'The Sun' on Monday, showing 95-year-old Asner and his wife relaxing on a terrace among Euro 2008 soccer fans in Klagenfurt, Carinthia.
"There is absolutely no justification for the continued refusal to extradite this wanted Nazi war criminal to the country where he committed his nefarious crimes," the Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff wrote in a letter to Austria’s justice minister Maria Berger.
Asner is accused of having organized the deportation of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to Nazi concentration camps. He allegedly served as police chief under the pro-Nazi Ustasha movement, which governed Croatia after the Nazi occupation in 1941. Asner, who has been living in Klagenfurt since 2006 under the name of Georg Aschner, is wanted by Croatian courts.
Austrian Justice Ministry spokesman Thomas Geiblinger told the AFP news agency that "The extradition procedure to Croatia was halted last year after two expert psychiatric reports from 2006 and 2007 were put forward." Only the Klagenfurt court that had made the initial ruling could reopen the case, he said. Klagenfurt prosecution spokesman Manfred Herrnhofer said that Asner suffered from "serious dementia" and could not be extradited.
