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Nazi Suspect Dies Before Trial

23 November 2010 02:01 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. One of the worldâ€™s most-wanted Nazis, Samuel Kunz, has died before he could stand trial for his alleged role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, APA reports quoting â€œThe Voice of Americaâ€.

A German court in Bonn said Monday Kunz died on November 18 in his hometown. No details surrounding his death have been released.

The 89-year-old had been charged in July with assisting in the killing of 430,000 Jews from 1942-1943 at the Belzec concentration camp in Poland.

The former death camp guard was also charged in the shooting deaths of 10 Jews.

Kunz was born in the Soviet Union and served in the Soviet army before being taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans. He then worked in the death camps.

The Jewish human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had listed him as the third most-wanted Nazi.

The director of the center in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, called Kunzâ€™s death â€œfrustrating.â€ Zuroff criticized Germanyâ€™s slow prosecution of former Nazis.

Kunzâ€™s case surfaced during the investigations of another death camp guard and retired U.S. auto worker, John Demjanjuk. The 90-year-old, Ukrainian-born Damjanjuk is on trial in Munich.