German prosecutors in Munich on Monday formally indicted suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk for allegedly helping to murder 27,900 Jews and others, when he served as a guard at a Nazi death camp.
Demjanjuk was Simon Wiesenthal Center's number one suspect among Nazi guards known to be alive. In this case, he was accused of herding Jews to their deaths in gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943, based on German personnel records.
The trial date has not been set as Demjanjuk's defense team must respond and judges must decide whether to accept that case.
The trial will not begin before the end of September, said Demjanjuk's main lawer, Guenther Maull.
Demjanjuk's family also thought he is too frail to stand trial because as an 89-year-old man, he suffers from kidney disease, cancer and arthritis.
But the court statement said that "according to an expert medical report, the accused is considered fit enough to be tried." However, the doctors recommend that questioning be limited to two sessions of 90 minutes per day.
This was not the first time Demjanjuk faced such indictment. He was sentenced to death in 1988 in Israel for crimes against humanity after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp.
But in 1993, Israel's highest court overturned his sentence, after documents from the former Soviet Union indicated that "Ivan the Terrible" had probably been a different man.
Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine. He arrived in the United States in 1952 as a refugee, settling down in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the car industry. He was deported from the United States in May.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), with headquarters in Los Angeles, California, was a non-governmental organization (NGO) established in 1977 and a famous Nazi hunter.
(Xinhua News Agency July 14, 2009)
