German investigators who have hunted the Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim for decades said on Thursday that new information indicating the former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt in 1992 appeared credible and that they would attempt to locate his corpse to rule out any doubt. The Baden-Württemberg state police unit which investigates Nazi-era crimes was preparing a request asking Egyptian authorities to allow them to pursue the case in Cairo, a spokesman said. "We want to attempt to find the body," he told the 'Associated Press.'
Heim's son Rüdiger told Germany's ZDF television that his father fled to Egypt after authorities tried to arrest him at his Baden-Baden home in 1962. He thus contradicted previous statements that he had never had any contact with his father since that time, telling ZDF that he had met with him several times in Cairo, starting in the mid-1970s. Asked about the discrepancies, Heim told the AP on Thursday that the ZDF interview was the correct version of the story. "You can trust this interview," he said. Heim would not elaborate on why he decided to speak now, or why he kept his silence for so long.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's head Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said Aribert Heim has previously been linked to Egypt, but the story raises "more questions than it answers." "There's no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave - we can't sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation," Zuroff told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "Keep in mind these people have a vested interested in being declared dead - it's a perfectly crafted story; that's the problem, it's too perfect."
