Latvian prosecutors were assembling documents Tuesday to submit a formal request to Australian authorities for the extradition of alleged Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs.
"We are working hard to finish this as fast as possible," said Dzintra Subrovska, a spokeswoman for the Latvian prosecutor general's office.
A Riga municipal court Monday issued an arrest warrant for Kalejs, 87, authorising Latvia to seek his extradition from his home in the Australian city of Melbourne.
Kalejs' lawyers have seven days to appeal the decision and prosecutors say they will be ready to make an immediate request for extradition should the appeal fail.
Prosecutors charged Kalejs with genocide last month, alleging he led a guard unit at a forced labor camp outside Riga which was responsible for the starvation, torture and murder of Jews, Gypsies and others between 1942 and 1943.
Nazi hunters, who have long criticized Latvia's unwillingness to prosecute Nazi war criminals, urged authorities here to seek Kalejs' extradition as soon as possible.
"If the process is dragged out it will achieve nothing," said Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office. "Latvia needs the trial and the education that goes with it."
Kalejs has admitted being an officer in the notorious Latvian death squad the Arajs Kommando, but denies committing any atrocities.
The charges allege he led a guard unit in 1942 and 1943 at a forced-labor camp in the town of Salaspils, 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the Latvian capital Riga, where scores of Jews and Russian prisoners of war were executed and tortured.
Kalejs is reportedly suffering from prostate cancer, dementia and blindness, factors his lawyer said the Riga court failed to consider Monday when ordering his arrest.
But Nazi hunters suggest Kalejs may be exaggerating his poor health to prevent his extradition.
"We're going to start to see him develop all kinds of illnesses," the head of the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, Eli Rosenbaum, told AFP in a telephone interview last week. "It always happens. We call it the Pinochet syndrome."
He was referring to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who was allowed to escape extradition from Britain to Spain on the grounds of ill health.
Rosenbaum led a successful effort to deport Kalejs from the United States in 1994.
Kalejs fled from Britain earlier this year after Nazi hunters blew the cover he was using to stay at a nursing home, and returned to Austrialia where he became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s.
Australian authorities have previously indicated they will cooperate with a request to extradite Kalejs, but warned he enjoyed rights like any other citizen.
Kalejs would be the first suspected Nazi collaborator tried in Latvia since the Baltic country gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.
More than 90 percent of Latvia's pre-war Jewish community of 70,000 perished in the Holocaust -- RIGA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
