German court rejects criticism of role in Nazi hunt

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080630/ap_on_re_eu/germany_nazi_hunting

BERLIN - A German court on Monday rejected criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center that its decisions disallowing certain telephone taps have been obstructing the hunt for former SS doctor Aribert Heim.
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The Jewish human rights organization on Friday said the Baden-Baden state court judge in charge of the case had disallowed German police requests on several occasions for telephone taps of Heim's relatives and an old friend who had been in contact with the fugitive.

But Heinz Heister, presiding judge and spokesman for the court, said that in the case of the friend, there had been no appeal of the court's decision, and that the only time a decision disallowing "investigative measures" was challenged, the Baden-Baden court's ruling was upheld.

"Investigative measures — even in the case of a person urgently suspected of many counts of murder — are held to certain boundaries by the constitution and the laws," Heister said in a statement.

Heim, 94, was known for his sadism as a doctor at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration camp. He was able to flee before authorities came to arrest him in the southern town of Baden-Baden in 1962, however, and his whereabouts today remain unknown.

He was indicted by the Baden-Baden state court in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979 and tops the Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.

Heister noted that the court had often approved many different types of investigative methods, including telephone taps, wanted posters, television appeals and requests of assistance from other countries.

That "makes clear that the highest effort is being put into the search, in accordance with the particular importance of these criminal proceedings," he said.

The Wiesenthal Center on Friday said it had only recently learned of the telephone taps being rejected by the court and sent out a press release to bring attention to it.

"We hope to bring to the attention of the authorities that there are legal obstacles which are preventing the proper investigation of the case, and preventing steps which we feel would contribute significantly to finding Dr. Heim," said Efraim Zuroff, the organization's top Nazi hunter.
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