Nazi hunter comes looking for war criminals here

Israeli Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff arrives in New Zealand tomorrow to publicise Operation Last Chance, a last attempt to round up surviving Nazi war criminals.

The Sunday-Star-Times reported today that Mr Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said that the operation might uncover Nazi war criminals living in New Zealand.

The newspaper said that in 1990 Mr Zuroff, who has not visited New Zealand before, sent the Government the names of 46 suspected Nazi war criminals living in this country.

But after a police inquiry, the National government decided in 1992 there was not enough evidence to bring a prosecution.

The centre now runs Operation Last Chance, which offers a US$10,000 ($15,126) reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of war criminals.

"We think if it's okay for America to offer US$25 million for Osama bin Laden, it's all right to offer US$10,000 for a Nazi war criminal," Mr Zuroff said last week from Melbourne, where he had been publicising two Australian cases.

Operation Last Chance, started in 2002, threw up the name of Karoly Zentai, a Hungarian in Perth who is fighting extradition to Hungary to face accusations of murdering a Jewish teenager in 1944.

In August last year, Australian Labor MP Michael Danby raised the case of Melbourne resident Lajos Polgar, who was part of the fascist Arrow Cross movement in that tortured and killed Jews in war-time Hungary.

The 1990 lists included a Lithuanian man in Auckland who was in the 15th Lithuanian Police Battalion, which massacred Jews in in 1941. He died in 1994.

In Perth this month Mr Zuroff called on 84-year-old Mr Zentai to abandon his legal challenge to extradition proceedings and face his alleged war crimes in a European court.

Mr Zentai had been due in Perth Magistrate's Court on February 13 for a hearing on a request for his extradition to Hungary, where he is alleged to have murdered Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in 1944.

But a protest by Mr Zentai's legal team to the Federal Court, which challenges West Australian magistrates' power to deal with commonwealth extradition laws, resulted in the case being put off until next month.

"The Hungarian government would never have sought extradition if there wasn't a solid case against Mr Zentai," Mr Zuroff told Southern Cross Radio.

"I don't see any reason why he shouldn't be extradited frankly, and I think it will be extremely important that he's extradited, and this would afford Australia an opportunity to take successful legal action against (an alleged) Nazi war criminal who found refuge in this country.

"If we ignore Mr Zentai simply because he reached a chronological age, we are basically sending the worst possible message."

Mr Zentai denies the accusations and his family has previously said he was too ill to be extradited.

"I suggest to Mr Zentai that he saves everyone here a lot of taxpayer money and just goes back to Hungary, faces the courts and if he is innocent then prove it," Mr Zuroff said.

"These people are old ... all you have to do is do the math.

"What we are saying is that because they have eluded justice does not in any way diminish their culpability."

- NZPA