Vienna:  The Simon Wiesenthal Centre said today it had called on the Austrian authorities to extradite alleged Croatian Nazi war criminal Milivoj Asner, who has been living in there since 2006.

The move came after pictures were published in the British tabloid The Sun today, showing Asner and his wife relaxing on a terrace among Euro 2008 football fans in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, in southern Austria.

"There is absolutely no justification for the continued refusal to extradite this wanted Nazi war criminal to the country where he committed his nefarious crimes," the centre's director Efraim Zuroff wrote in a letter Austrian Justice Minister Maria Berger.

Asner is accused of having organised the deportation of Serbs, Jews and gypsies to concentration camps most of whom were killed there. He allegedly served as police chief under the Ustase fascist movement, which governed Croatia after the Nazi occupation in 1941.

The 95-year-old, who has been living in Klagenfurt since 2006 under the name Georg Aschner, is wanted by the Croatian courts.

"The photos, and video clips... Make it abundantly clear that Asner is in good health, lucid and able to get around on his own, in contradiction to the finding of an Austrian court which rules that he cannot be extradited to stand trial in Croatia due to ill health," Zuroff said in his letter to Berger.

But Austrian justice ministry spokesman Thomas Geiblinger told AFP: "The extradition procedure to Croatia was halted last year after two expert psychiatric reports from 2006 and 2007 were put forward."

Source : PTI