Lithuania's prosecutor-general has dropped a war crimes inquiry into the Jewish World War II partisan Yitzhak Arad. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor-general said the two-year-old investigation into World War II-era activities of Yitzhak Arad, former chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, had been dropped because of insufficient data. During the probe, 83 people were interviewed. The inquiry stemmed from the publication of memoirs recalling partisan activities against Nazis and their collaborators in wartime Lithuania.
It is as yet unknown whether the inquiry of two other elderly former partisans, Rachel Margolis and Fania Brantsovsky, will also be ended. The incident in question was a Soviet-led ambush of Lithuanian collaborators in which 38 villagers were killed, including children and a pregnant woman.
Lithuania's consul-general in New York, Jonas Paslauskas, had acknowledged previously that negative publicity abroad had generated second thoughts on the inquiry by Lithuania's highest officials, including President Valdas Adamkus. Last month, Adamkus indicated that he would push to have the inquiry dropped.
