Arrest warrant issued for Nazi suspect

German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for 88-year-old US resident John Demjanjuk on suspicion he helped in at least 29,000 murders as a Nazi death camp guard, they said on today.

Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory in the killings of Jews between March and September 1943 at the Sobibor death camp, now in Poland, prosecutors in the southern German city of Munich said in a statement.

They want to extradite the retired auto worker.

"As soon as the accused is in Germany, (we) intend to examine him and charge him with being an accessory to 29,000 murders," the prosecutors said in the statement.

Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk denies any involvement in war crimes. He has said he was in the Soviet army and a prisoner of war in 1942. He later went to the United States.

Stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp, Demjanjuk was first extradited to Israel in 1986.

He was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably the notorious "Ivan".

Demjanjuk returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored his citizenship in 1998.

The U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and hid these facts when he immigrated.

Last year, Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator in Ludwigsburg, Kurt Schrimm, asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk lived before he emigrated to the United States, to charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.

Schrimm said his office had evidence Demjanjuk had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp and personally led Jews to the gas chambers there.

Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomed Germany's move. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Center's Jerusalem Office, said in a statement he hoped there would be no more delays. Previously, the Center had criticised German prosecutors for dragging their feet.

A spokesman for Germany's Justice Ministry said it was trying to establish whether the US would deport Demjanjuk or whether Germany would officially start extradition proceedings.

Last month, Demjanjuk's ex son-in-law said the suspect was in poor health and unfit to face another trial.