September 28, 2005
A Canadian judge is hearing testimony from witnesses in Italy before deciding whether to strip a former Nazi officer of his Canadian citizenship. Justice James O'Reilly opened the hearings on Monday in the northern city of Verona, where elderly witnesses were brought together and documentation was assembled to recount the war crimes that prompted Italian courts to sentence Michael Seifert, 81, to life in prison, an Italian prosecutor and a defense lawyer said. The Italian hearings were set up to determine whether Seifert should be stripped of his Canadian citizenship for allegedly lying about his background and Second World War activities when emigrating to Canada. In 2000, an Italian court convicted Seifert of torturing and murdering eleven people while serving as a prison camp guard in northern Italy during the final stage of the war. At the Italian trial, people testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out a person's eyes, beat prisoners before shooting them and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter.
